Communalism in Undivided Bengal: Shrouding Class Conflict with Religion

Communalism in Undivided Bengal: Shrouding Class
Conflict with Religion


Taj Hashmi* (June 2, 2006)

* (Research Associate, York Centre for Asian Research
York University, Toronto, Canada ; Email: taj_hashmi AT hotmail.com)


This paper aims at shedding light on the frequently
misunderstood phenomenon called “communalism”,
inherently a South Asian _expression connoting much
more than its actual meaning implying something very
ominous and nasty, in colonial Bengal. This perennial
conflict mainly between the Hindu and Muslim
communities, supposed to have originated because of
the differences in the rituals, beliefs and practices
of the two communities, not before but during the
British colonial rule, has not died out in independent
India and Bangladesh.

As laymen are baffled as to why Hindus and Muslims
have been fighting or showing disrespect to each
other’s faith, rituals, norms, behaviour or anything
associated with the “other”, so are some social
scientists, including historians. They associate the
problem with religiosity, lack of secular and modern
education, and intolerance of the people concerned
bred by some religious texts, the Quran or the Vagbad
Geeta, depending on who are explaining the enigmatic
phenomenon called communal conflict, hatred and
antagonism. Contrary to the laymen understanding and
lopsided analyses by scholars, journalists and
politicians, had religiosity of the people or the
alleged hateful teachings of the religious texts been
responsible for communalism, then the pre-British (and
pre-modern) Mughal period would have witnessed
thousands of rioting and embittered Hindu-Muslim
relationship. Interestingly, history records only a
few sporadic Hindu-Muslim clashes during the Holi
Festival in the early 18th century under the Mughals.

The _expression, “Communalism”, has been in use in the
Subcontinent since the second-half of the 19th
century. Jawaharlal Nehru, a non-communal, agnostic
politician and the first prime minister of India, who
would have been famous for his scholarship alone,
feels that what is “nationalism” for the majority
community becomes “communalism” when the minorities do
similar things to protect and assert their rights.

Another great mind, socialist historian (Harvard
professor) Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916-2001), in his
seminal book, Modern Islam in India: A Social
Analysis, first published from Lahore in 1943 while
this great Canadian scholar was a young lecturer at
Lahore Foreman Christian College, aptly reiterates “…
the phenomenon called ‘communalism’ has developed into
something for which ‘nationalism’ now seems a better
name” [Lahore 1969, p.187].

I am citing Nehru and Smith to highlight flaws of
their unworthy successors in the realms of politics,
pedagogy, scholarship and popular culture in regard to
racial, linguistic and religious conflicts in South
Asia. In Bangladesh, the situation is abysmally
bizarre. Many Bangladeshis cannot differentiate
between “communal” and revivalist puritan orthodoxy
and political Islam. To them, from the Jamaat-i-Islami
to BNP, JMB to Harkatul Jihad, Janata Party to Shiva
Sena and RSS are all “communal” parties, groups and
organizations.

It is unfortunate that Badruddin Umar’s tireless
effort to distinguish between chauvinism/nationalism
and communalism since the 1960s, especially through
his books, Sampradayikata and Sangskritik
Sampradayikata, has gone down the drains. Hence the
tendency to lump together all forms of racial,
linguistic and religious discriminations and
prejudices of the majority communities against the
minorities into the amorphous “laddu” or dough of
“communalism”. The big difference between religious
revivalism and communalism should restrain us from
portraying the Jamaat-i-Islami or the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (VHP) as “communal”.

As parties and organizations run by members of the
majority communities, such as Hitler’s Nazi Party,
VHP, Janata Party, BNP, Awami League (during the
Pakistani period for asserting majority Bengali
separatism), cannot be “communal”, so are Hitler,
Advani, Khaleda, Mujib, Tagore or Sarat Chatterjee.
They were/are German, Hindu, Muslim or Bengali
nationalists. And as someone’s “terrorist” is a
“freedom fighter” to others, similarly, the minority
community’s “chauvinist/hatemonger” is a
“nationalist/patriot” or “hero” to the majority
community.

Now, it depends how one classifies Tagore or
Chattejees (both Bankim and Sarat). If one considers
them as members of the majority Hindu community of the
Subcontinent, then they were “nationalists” albeit of
the pejorative “Hindu chauvinistic” type. The moment
one classifies them as members of the “minority Hindu
community of Bengal”, then all three of them (despite
their literary genius and kind words for Muslims,
reflected in their literary writings) were nothing but
arch communal hate-mongers and Hindu separatists. We
must draw a line between “Hindu/Muslim supremacist”
and “Hindu/Muslim separatist” – the former being
nationalist/chauvinist and the latter
communal/separatist.

As W. C. Smith has elaborated, one does not have to be
“religiously ardent, tepid or cold; orthodox, liberal
or atheist; righteous or vicious” to be classified as
“communal”, both communalism of the minority and
chauvinism of the majority communities are by-products
of economic, religious and psychological factors
[p.187]. The adherents of supremacist/exclusionist
ideology and the separatist minorities are again
subject to false consciousness, vainglory and narrow
class/group interest. As members of the Muslim
minority community in colonial India nourished the
wrong ideology of extra-territoriality, considering
themselves as descendants of “foreigners” from the
Middle East and Central Asia, members of the majority
Hindu community, quite expediently accepted their
false credentials to marginalize them as “foreigners”.
Smith is worth quoting again: “Hinduism has never
outgrown its tribalism; has never aspired or claimed
to be anything higher than the religion of a group, or
rather a series of sub-groups eternalized in the caste
system. To the Hindu, every Indian who is a Muslim is
an outcast out-caste, an Untouchable with whom
dealings must not be so intimate as to transgress
certain formal rules. This exclusion is religious; but
with Hinduism ‘religious’ means ‘social’ in a highly
evolved traditional way” pp.189-90].

The socio-economic base of communalism in undivided
Bengal was different from that of northwestern India.
Similarly the northwest was almost totally different
from South India in this regard. While the Punjab, UP,
Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal witnessed
intense communal hatred, tension and occasional mass
killing and rioting during the 1870s and 1950s, the
coastal regions of the Subcontinent (excepting
Calcutta and Chittagong) in Bombay and Madras
Presidencies were almost totally immune to such
barbarism. Does this mean the Hindus and Muslims of
Bombay and Madras were/are less religious, having
little sense of belonging to their respective
communities? We know that is not the case. The reason
behind Hindus and Muslims living in much more peace
and harmony in the South than their co-religionists
did/do in the North is their learning English and
supporting and opposing the British Raj together.

On the other hand, in the North, especially in Bengal,
the bulk of the Hindus supported the Raj for the
first hundred-odd years while the bulk of the Muslims
were fighting and non-cooperating with the British up
to the 1870s and later they reversed their role.
Henceforth the bulk of the Hindus joined the
anti-British nationalist movement, opposing and
non-cooperating with the Raj, while the vast majority
of Muslims started collaborating with the British
(imitating what their Hindu neighbours had done
earlier), learning English for upward mobility under
the influence of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1818-1898),
Maulana Karamat Ali Jaunpuri (1800-1873), Nawab Abdul
Latif (1828-1893) and their likes up to the Partition.

Those who trace the roots of Hindu-Muslim communalism
to the invasions and plundering by Sultan Mahmud, and
about 600 years of Muslim rule in India are influenced
by the historiography, which not only portrays Babar
as the “demolisher” of a temple at Ayodhya and
Awrangzeb as the “anti-Hindu bigot” but also depicts
the British Raj as the epitome of benevolence,
tolerance and justice. Besides the selective use of
history by both Hindus and Muslims, the crux of the
problem lay with the unequal socio-economic and
political developments of the two communities, which
mainly contributed to the growth of mutual mistrust,
hatred, prejudice and rivalries in every sphere of
life in colonial northern India, including Bengal.

A cursory look at the history of undivided Bengal
during the British rule reveals that the rulers’
adopting the classical divide-and-rule policy was the
ONLY factor behind the growth, development and
culmination of communal antagonism between the Hindu
and Muslim communities in the province, like elsewhere
in northern India. We may highlight the following
landmarks in British Indian history, which were
responsible for the creation and widening of the
cleavages between the two communities:

The Permanent Settlement of 1793: The Mother of All
Evils in Bengal

No other British colonial act brought so much of
suffering, pain, humiliation on the Bengali psyche and
wreaked such havoc on Bengal’s agriculture,
industries, social structure, almost by permanently
destroying its economy and proverbial prosperity that
Bengal had witnessed during the Mughal period than did
this monstrous Permanent Settlement of land revenue.
This grossly unjust land settlement with revenue
collecting officials, known as Zamindars, turned them
into landlords in the British sense of the
_expression, whose liability to the Government (90% of
the revenue collected in an estate) was fixed
permanently. The monstrosity of the absurd land system
( “a caricature of British land system”, to paraphrase
Karl Marx) was that while the Zamindar’s liability to
the Government was fixed permanently for generations,
the tenant’s liability (the rent obligation) to the
Zamindar remained flexible, turning him almost into a
slave of his Zamindar. On top of the rent, the
Zamindar could extract illegal duties or taxes from
his tenants whenever he needed extra cash to buy an
elephant, to celebrate a wedding, child birth, or to
perform certain rituals or for self-gratifications,
sheer greed and caprice.

Incidentally, the bulk of the Zamindars in Bengal
since the vice-royalty (Nawabi) of Murshid Quli Khan
were Hindus. And by one stroke of the pen, they turned
into landlords or proprietors of land, which hitherto
had belonged to the Mughal Emperor. The bulk of the
peasantry in Bengal, mostly so in the eastern region,
were Muslims. Consequently any exaction by the greedy
and ruthless Zamindars (who could imprison and torture
their tenants with impunity up to the mid-19th
century) could be easily perceived as “Hindu”
exactions and excesses on “Muslims”. The fast transfer
of trading and industrial capital to Zamindari
enterprise by Bengali and non-Bengali merchants and
entrepreneurs installed rapacious traders,
moneylenders and speculators as Zamindars. They were
much more ruthless than the traditional Zamindars of
the Nawab.

While Bengali peasants and weavers (mostly Muslim)
were on the verge of total ruination due to the
Zamindari exactions and British traders’ dumping of
duty-free British textiles in the local market, a
nouveau riche class of English-educated upstarts were
fast replacing the powerless Muslim aristocracy,
military officers, judges and jurists who had become
redundant not long after the disaster of Plassey in
1757. By the 1850s, most of the Muslim aristocrats who
had been enjoying revenue free land grants (La Kharaj
Waqf endowments) to run schools, shrines and mosques
since the Mughal period lost their lands as they
failed to produce documents (lost or destroyed) in
favour of their claims, as required by the arbitrary
and unfair Resumption Proceedings (1820s-1850s) of the
Company Raj. Local Hindu traders and Zamindars, who
had the cash and government patronage, bought off
these acquired estates to the chagrin and anger of the
wretched Muslim aristocrats and their Muslim clients.
Meanwhile, in 1837, the British rulers had replaced
Persian with English as the Court (or official )
Language. Impoverished Muslims of Bengal could neither
afford nor willing to learn English, which their Hindu
neighbours, beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement,
learnt for upward mobility. Consequently the cleavage
between the two communities got further widened and
the relationship between them further embittered.

What followed the disastrous Plassey, Permanent
Settlement, Resumption Proceedings and the Abolition
of Persian as the Court Language was the sharp and
rapid decline/disappearance of Muslim aristocracy,
well-to-do peasants, artisans, professionals and
scholars in Bengal and the equally fast ascendancy of
the new classes of Hindu Zamindar-Bhadralok-Mahajan
out of the Hindu middle and lower middle classes. The
Muslim situation was so bad in Bengal by the 1870s
that British civil servant and writer William Hunter
observed in his book, Our Indian Mussulmans, that
fifty years back it was impossible to find a poor
Muslim in Bengal and in 1870, due to lack of
government patronage, it became impossible for them to
remain rich.

The Permanent Settlement not only brought about
changes in the land system but also transformed the
entire Bengali society with new values, new culture,
turning nouveau riche Zamindars and their
beneficiaries into arrogant feudal lords, rapacious
money-lenders and ruthless lawyers. These parasitical
classes lived on the masses – Muslim, Namasudra and
other “low-caste” Hindus – and despite having modern
secular education in English nourished and promoted
feudal and pre-capitalist values. With few exceptions,
the bulk of the Zamindar-Bhadralok classes on the one
hand glorified the British benefactors and on the
other promoted Hindu revival and anti-Muslim (actually
anti-peasant) sentiment, using hate as the best weapon
to subjugate the lowly Muslim Chasha (peasant). Hatred
and prejudice bred equal amount of hatred and
prejudice among the defiled and ridiculed Muslim
Chasha (this is not that different from Newton’s Third
Law of Motion). Dominant Hindus ridiculed Bengali
Muslims as Nerrey-Mlechha-Javana
(skinhead-unclean-foreigner) both in private and
public discourse, including literary works by Ishwar
Gupta and Bankim Chatterjee. Some Hindu Zamindars in
Faridpur, 24-Parganas and Nadia even imposed a “Beard
Tax” on Muslim peasants in the 1820s and 1830s. The
upshot was a number of peasant insurgencies in the
garb of Islam, the Faraizi Movement under Shariatullah
and Dudu Miyan in parts of
Faridpur-Pabna-Barisal-Dhaka and the militant uprising
by Titu Meer in Nadia-24-Pargana sub-regions of
Bengal.

Since then Muslim and Hindu communalists/separatists
did not look back. While Hindu
Zamindar-Bhadralok-Mahajan continued to oppose all
government or Muslim initiated attempts to uplift the
conditions of the Muslim community in Bengal through
the Bengal Tenancy Amendment Acts, education, and
redress against the extortionist money-lending system
with lame excuses, Muslim peasants, small middle
classes and aristocrats resisted the Hindu opposition.
During the first hundred-odd years of the British Raj,
while Hindus in general remained loyal to the
Government, Muslim opposition was directed both
against the British and their well-to-do Hindu
beneficiaries. With the change of the tide, while
sections of the erstwhile loyal Hindus joined the
nationalist bandwagon, especially after the Partition
of Bengal (1905-11), Muslims in Bengal as elsewhere in
India, readily responded to British overtures to win
over the Muslim community, which had already started
in the 1870s due to the untiring efforts by Sir Sayyid
Ahmad Khan in north India, and Karamat Ali Jaunpuri
and Nawab Abdul Latif in Bengal.

The period between 1905 and 1947 witnessed the
bitterest Hindu-Muslim antagonism and conflicts in
Bengal. With direct British support (which was in line
with their colonial divide-and-rule policy) and
patronage, Bengali Muslims started collaborating with
the British as they rightly visualized the advantages
of their socio-political and economic uplift through
collaboration with the British. Hindu aristocrats,
professionals, intellectuals, clerks, teachers,
shopkeepers, money-lenders in general were very
unhappy with the British as they were no longer
willing to play the second fiddle as their subjects.
By then Muslims had experienced bitter Hindu
chauvinism, both within and outside Bengal. Hindu
revivalist Arya Samaj and Hindu opposition to Urdu in
favour of Hindi (even by men like Lala Lajpat Rai who
could not read and write Hindi but Urdu) had already
alarmed non-communal Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, who once
identified himself as a Hindu (“Muslim-Hindu” as he
was born in India or Hind) and considered Hindu and
Muslim as two eyes of India. The anti-Partition
(1905-11) Swadeshi Movement, which directly promoted
Hindu revival and perpetuation of Muslim subjugation
in Bengal by Hindu super-ordinates further embittered
the Hindu-Muslim relationship. The Hindu opposition to
the Dhaka University proposal, by men like Ashutosh
Mukherjee and Rabindranath Tagore, and their
constantly vociferous opposition to any attempt to
grant more rights to Bengal peasants through
amendments of the Bengal Tenancy Act during 1923-38,
the Free Rural Primary Education Bill, the
Money-lenders Bill in the 1930s and 1940s sharply
polarized the two communities both within and outside
the Bengal legislature. Fazlul Huq, Maulana Bhashani,
H.S. Suhrawardy, Khwaja Nazimuddin, Abul Hashim, Nawab
Salimullah and Sir Abdur Rahim, among others,
championed the Muslim/peasant cause and Hindu
politicians, professionals, intellectuals and
journalists openly promoted Zamindar-Bhadralok-Mahajan
interests to the detriment of Muslims/peasants up to
the Partition of 1947.

In view of the above, there is no truth in the
assertion that the anti-Muslim communal rhetoric of
Bankim, Tagore and Sarat were in reaction to the
communal stand of the Muslim League or M.A. Jinnah.
While Bankim glorified Hindutva in the 1880s, Tagore
did so with subtlety during the first thirty years of
the 20th century and Sarat Chatterjee advocated the
expulsion of Muslims from India in 1926, long before
Chaudhry Rahmat Ali coined the term “Pakistan” in 1934
and the so-called Pakistan Resolution of March 1940.
It is absolutely incorrect to ascribe his anti-Muslim
speech at a Hindu Mahasbha rally to the Hindu-Muslim
rioting at Pabna in 1926. The Pabna rioting was
short-lived and much smaller in scale than the
Calcutta rioting, which preceded the former. Pakistan
demand could not be a cause for rioting rather it was
an unfortunate effect of Hindu Chauvinism and Muslim
communalism/separatism. And it may be mentioned that
Jinnah was agreeable to the Cabinet Mission Proposal
for an Indian confederation till Nehru’s rejection of
the proposal in July 1946. So, Pakistan was by no
means inevitable. Pakistan became inevitable not
because of the Punjab or UP Muslims’ desire for a
separate homeland. Pakistan became inevitable firstly
because of Bengali Muslim peasants’ desire to have
better rights and opportunities. Another factor behind
the creation of Pakistan was Hindu elite’s desire to
partition Bengal after they realized that Bengali
Muslims (children of the Chasha, many graduated from
the undesirable Dhaka University) would perpetually
rule the province by virtue of their number.

So, there is absolutely no point in fabricating or
relying on stories about Suhrawardy’s and Sheikh
Mujib’s instigating the Calcutta rioting of 1946-47 as
there are credible evidences to the contrary. There
are documentary evidences, including Suhrawardy’s
personal correspondence with Jinnah and Liaquat Ali in
1947 and 1948, which proves beyond any doubt that he
tried his best to save both Hindus and Muslims in
Calcutta as well as Noakhali (which was again a noisy
tea-party in comparison to Great Calcutta Killing of
1946 and the Bihar Carnage of 1947). What we see in
Attenborough’s Gandhi, which portrays both Jinnah and
Suhrawardy with nothing but tar and what we read and
hear about the Noakhali rioting in most books mainly
based on Congress and Mahasabha owned newspaper
reporting are grossly exaggerated accounts and
fabrications. Noakhali carnage was a brutal reaction
to the Great Calcutta Killing of August-September
1946. Mainly Bengali Muslim peasants and working
classes took part in the killing, raping and “forcible
conversion” and marriage of Hindu women in and around
Chhagalnaiya Thana. Around 350 Hindus, many of whom
were money-lenders, got killed. Golam Sarwar, a local
peasant leader was the main agent provocateur. He lost
his son-in-law who was a jute mill worker in Calcutta,
in the Calcutta rioting of 1946.

In sum, Muslim communalism and Hindu chauvinism in
undivided Bengal were by-products of uneven growth and
development of the two communities, who historically
lived in peace and harmony throughout the Mughal
period. The uneven growth and development of the
Muslim and Hindus of Bengal was mainly due to the
divisive policy of the British rulers and partially
incidental on British policy of turning Bengali
traders and entrepreneurs into Zamindars to get rid of
competitors from Bengali capitalist classes for the
benefit of British trade and industries. The British
policy of disbanding the pre-existing army and police
and replacing the Indian code with British law also
hard hit Muslims in Bengal (and elsewhere in India) as
they were predominant in these professions under the
Mughals. Muslim arrogance and incapability to learn
English due to poverty also contributed to their
backwardness. With the transfer of the capital from
Murshidabad to Calcutta, thousands of Muslim families
from the depopulated Murshidabad and Dhaka had to
settle in rural areas as peasants and destitute. The
emergence of Calcutta as the new metropolis of Bengal
(and India) on the one hand signalled the rise of the
Hindu professionals and capitalist classes, mainly
emanating from the beneficiaries of the Permanent
Settlement; and on the other, it also indicated the
ruralisation and pauperization of the hitherto
dominant Muslim classes. The antagonistic classes of
Bengali Hindu “haves” and Muslim “have-nots” fought
each other for around two hundred years, the former to
perpetuate their stronghold on the political economy
and the latter to create a new niche in the body
politic of Bengal (and India). They did not shy out
from the prospect of replacing the Hindu beneficiaries
of the Permanent Settlement and British rule either by
reverting to the pre-British Muslim order or by
establishing their “peasant utopia” or Pakistan.

In short, the events and process leading to the “Great
Divide” or the greatest tragedy for Bengal after the
disaster of Plassey to occur up to 1947 tell us how
and why fear, hatred, ignorance and prejudice,
primarily produced and nourished by the majority and
adopted by the minority community with the
machinations of the vicious colonial rulers made the
Partition inevitable and the hangover of the past
bitterness so heady and long-lasting. The un-equal
“elite conflict” between the rich and powerful Hindu
beneficiaries of the Permanent Settlement and the poor
and weak Bengali Muslim victims of the Permanent
Settlement is the main theme of the story of Hindu
chauvinism and Muslim communalism in Bengal. Since the
budding Bengali Muslim elite with jotedar/talukdar
[rich peasants] background was too weak to withstand
the mighty Zamindar-Bhadralok-Mahajan triumvirate,
they had to get the patronage of the Urdu-speaking
elite or the ashraf, from within and outside Bengal.
The ashraf also needed the jotedar support to reach
the middle and lower peasants (Muslim and Namasudra),
especially on the eve of the provincial elections of
1937, as by then the Government of India Act of 1935
had enfranchised many well-to-peasants. Northwest
Indian ashraf, under the leadership of charismatic
Jinnah, in alliance with the Nawab of Dhaka and other
ashraf leaders of Bengal forged ties with lower ashraf
and Muslim jotedar/talukdar classes of East Bengal.
The ulama or Muslim theologians played an important
role in the ashraf-jotedar marriage (of convenience).
Thus the Muslim Ashraf-Ulama-Jotedar triumvirate came
into being to challenge the powerful Hindu
Zamindar-Bhadralok-Mahajan triumvirate.

By then, due to the prevalent discriminatory and
humiliating behaviour of “upper” caste Hindus towards
them, the bulk of the Bengali peasants had first been
communalized and then politicized under the influence
of the ulama. Hindu opposition to cow slaughtering and
treatment of Muslim peasants as “live stock” and
untouchables (to paraphrase Nirad Chaudhury,
Autobiography of an Unkown Indian, London 1951 and
Abul Mansur Ahmed, Amar Dekha Rajnitir Panchash
Bachhar, Dhaka 1970) thoroughly communalized the bulk
of Bengali Muslims by the 1920s. Afterwards under the
influence of the rustic mullah, Bengali Muslims learnt
how to classify the Hindus as kafir [non-believer],
mushrik [polytheist] and malaun [the cursed one or the
Devil]. They also learn how to hate everything Hindu,
including their gods and goddesses. Even a dead Hindu
was not spared. The mullah taught Bengali Muslims to
wish eternal hell fire [fi nare jahannam] to all
Hindu souls. This is still done in the region.


One may find the following works useful in
understanding communalism in undivided Bengal:

John H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural
Society:Twentieth Century Bengal, UCP, Berkeley 1968;

Joya Chatterjee, Bengal Divided : Hindu Communalism
and Partition, 1932-1947, CUP, Cambridge 2002;

Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905-1947, OUP,
Oxford 1994;

Taj I. Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia The
Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal,
1920-1947, Westview Press, Boulder-San
Francisco-Oxford, 1992