3. The Riot

Language of the Unheard

[Golam:]

The fight continued for three days.…The two sides were sitting facing each other for three days.

Were they literally fighting for three days?

No, they were just sitting for three days and nights.

Sitting for three days and nights! There wasn’t fighting?

Now and then someone would chase someone else, a little jostling would happen.

So culture-bound was my picture of a riot—people running about, smashing things, looting things, beating each other up—that I literally didn’t believe my ears.^[1] People sat, faced off, for three days, a ritualized battle of stubborn sides, each waiting for the other to blink. These rioters spoke a language of gesture quite different from my own.^[*]

[*] By language I mean a set of symbols that express ideas and describe objects and events within a given community of understanding. Words express ideas, and so do behaviors.

Action and Meaning

Crowds offer an opportunity for common citizens to speak openly, at the very moment when their lives are most unsettled and their consciousness most in flux. Although scholars rarely formulate their intellectual interest in these terms, in fact what crowd studies do is to listen to public statements made by people who are ordinarily privatized, statements made in the language of collective actions. How people behave, the precise acts they choose and the spirit in which they commit them, are windows briefly opened to reveal what they think. In the apt phrase of Sandria Freitag, crowd actions are texts,^[2] expressions of belief and experience more articulate than those we normally receive. Viewed in this light, gestures become a rich language.

The ways people express themselves are not open to endless choice. One learns to speak a particular language because of the accident of birth. However, language is not static; it changes for a given community over time, and it changes for a given individual over a lifetime. Language embodies old ideas, new ideas, and lived experience. In childhood we learn a framework, and throughout life new vocabulary and new concepts are added to that framework. Experience, too, influences how ideas are formulated and, consequently, how they are expressed. In turn, language determines to an important extent the concepts of which thought is composed, and consequently the content of thought itself. How we speak and what we think intimately interact to form the consciousness out of which we act, so that actions are both expressions of thought and also the materials out of which new ideas and new expressions are formed.

What sort of ear we tune to this language of collective action has everything to do with our underlying theories of human behavior. The granddaddy of crowd studies, Gustave Le Bon, took crowds to be villainous assemblages of irrationality, both sign and conveyor of the downfall of civilizations. “In consequence of the purely destructive nature of their power,” he wrote in 1885, “crowds act like those microbes which hasten the dissolution of enfeebled or dead bodies.”^[3] Le Bon’s views today seem extreme, but his inclination to fear and condemn people massed retains a familiar ring, especially in the forms carried forward by his disciple Sigmund Freud. Freud drew heavily on the work of Le Bon when he studied group psychology and wrote:

In a group the individual is brought under conditions which allow him to throw off the repressions of his unconscious instinctual impulses. The apparently new characteristics which he then displays are in fact the manifestations of this unconscious, in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition.^[4]

If the crowds massed in Panipur operated instinctively, what orderly instincts they had!

More recent students of the crowd have found in the variety of gestures a chance to solve the problem of social history: how to write history from the point of view of people whose views so rarely appear in the public record.^[5] “There is anger in us,” Mofizuddin had told me thoughtfully, “even if we don’t express it. That’s internal talk, not something you speak about openly.” The riot was a medium through which to take that “inside talk”—all the old resentments, all the new possibilities—outside. What people did in the field that day described their rebellion and suggested its sources. Once I began to hear the details, truly to listen to how people rioted in Panipur, the questions multiplied: Who was there and how many of them? What exactly happened? How were they armed? What was happening on the periphery of the crowd? What did they eat? Who served them?

George Rudé, a historian who pioneered detailed inquiry into the actions of crowds, is said to have “put mind back into history and restored the dignity of man.”^[6] From within that tradition, it seemed to me entirely right that the villagers of Panipur sat down. It was a gesture both dignified and mindfully appropriate. In a mobile and commodity-dominated society rioters run about and grab television sets; these peasant rioters occupied land, stubbornly asserting their rights and rules.

At the same time, the consistency of their action was contradicted by the language in which they described it. All the villagers used the English word riot. The event might be better described as a sit-down strike or an occupation maneuver. Riot was a label the British attached to civil melees of a variety of sorts, and the Bengalis had adopted that designation. When the British used the word, they meant to suggest strong disapproval. Riots were acts of illegality, the mindless acts of recalcitrant subjects. In accepting the label riot, the Bengali peasants seemed to have accepted the disapprobation as well. They seemed reluctant to confess to the deed, telling the story only when asked directly.

It was perhaps significant that they told the story to me, a thoroughgoing outsider, a foreigner, a woman, a “European.” Although my “outsideness” was ameliorated in some ways (I spoke Bengali and was introduced and accompanied by people known to them and respected), nonetheless their decision to speak to me symbolized on a minor plane the major decisions involved in when to bring the “inside” talk out. I was reminded of James Scott’s notion of public and hidden transcripts. The former are the stories told by the subordinate to the dominant, stories carefully crafted to please. In private, people tell a different tale, but only occasionally are these hidden transcripts made public, at moments of resistance and rebellion.^[7] That the villagers talked to me thus reflected a very particular decision. It was, in other words, itself a meaningful gesture. All the more ironic, then, that they labeled their action riot, unaware that they were using a word from my language that connotes a censure they understood I did not feel, or so I infer from their act of speaking and of speaking without shame. Here was a prime example of language as a transaction between cultures; a dialogue of many meanings was contained in the use of a single word.

But while the word riot may have been loaded, the villagers were in fact describing events sharply distinguished from what had come before. One major difference between this event and the urban conflicts usually called riots is that the latter commonly involve strangers. When people in Panipur described the early phases of their “riot,” they named names. Almost everyone was known to them, recognizable, placeable by community, kin, and class. It was only when strangers arrived that the riot^[*] proper can be said to have begun. Altaf named the moment:

Now I no longer have enough courage to go to the Hindu side, because there are many unknown Hindus coming from other places. They won’t recognize me, so they might strike me.

The Panipur drama fell neatly into five distinct phases: quarrel, decision, riot, intervention, resolution. The moment when personal recognition failed and community identity took over, when the process of conflict moved beyond a quarrel over garden-variety village concerns, was when the riot proper began. With the arrival of outsiders, numbers swelled and personal familiarity waned, and the main act of the show was under way.

[*] For convenience, I will forsake the use of quotation marks around the word riot, leaving the reader to bear in mind the problem therein.

Day Three: Gathering Forces

Golam continued his story with the morning of the third day:

Then it was morning, and people of our community came with their scythes, dhal, and bolum [swords]. Many, many people came and assembled near our house. They came very early in the morning; it was still dark. They came armed with ram deos.

…By that time, nearly ten thousand people had gathered. They were all Mussalmans. But we couldn’t see any Hindus on the other side. Altaf-uddin said, “There is no need to fight,” not what he had said the evening before. He told us to release their cows. The matabbars also had changed their opinion. They said that it wouldn’t be good to fight just then.

Why did the matabbars change their opinion just at that point?

The sight of such a big crowd frightened them. They thought of the consequences if there were a murder.

Hadn’t the matabbars thought of that the night before?

Yes, they had. But they could not imagine that such a fearful thing [such a huge crowd] could happen. These matabbars were not educated people. They could not think that there would be such a big gathering.

As people gathered in the early hours, the leaders grew faint of heart. It was one thing to stir opinion to battle at night, in the lantern-lit glow of familiar rooms filled with lifelong acquaintances. It was quite another thing next day in the morning light to urge on tens of thousands of heavily armed men, many of them strangers. Nudging the juggernaut into motion had been easy; applying the brakes was not. Both sides turned to the authorities for help:

Ten thousand people gathered there. And the officer in charge of the police station came there in the morning. Both the Hindus and the Mussalmans went to the police station to give the information.…But the Mussalmans were still gathering there. The number of Mussalmans was gradually increasing. There were new arrivals and the size of the gathering went on increasing.…

The people had all gathered near our house. The Mussalmans were sitting on the northern side, but the Hindus could not be seen on the southern side.

The Muslim forces were now coalesced. Even though the Hindus could not be seen on their side of the village, the Muslims were certain they were there. Now the leaders—village headmen, Altaf, and outside officials—made a concerted effort to intervene:

In the meantime, the president [Altaf] and the O. C. [the police officer in charge] came here and forbade us. They said there was no need to make trouble. Then their matabbars were advised to free the cows, and our matabbars also were advised to free the cows. We freed all six cows we were holding. Trusting what our matabbars told us, we let the cows go. We let go all six cows. They [the Namasudras] had captured three cows. Sometime later, they also freed those cows.

Golam and other local players complied with the leaders’ demands. But they were no more in control than the matabbars and Altaf were. Tempers had gone well beyond the question of cows. The time for conciliation was past:

The moment the Hindus freed the cows, the Mussalmans started running toward the Hindu para [neighborhood], with all their arms and weapons. They started running toward the south, toward the Namasudras.

Nobody could deter them, not even a threat of arms by the police officer. Young Golam tried to stop their rush:

Now we—I myself, the O. C., and Altaf-uddin also—were all trying to prevent them. But they paid no heed to what we said. They even came and tried to strike me with a weapon. They said they would murder me if I did not move out of their way.…The O. C. showed them his guns and told them to go back and made as if to shoot them [if they did not]. But the Mussalmans did not come back. They rushed toward Kumar…Tarkhania’s house.

One of the more controversial acts of the day’s drama now took place. All accounts agreed that the Muslim crowd were the initial aggressors. Golam, the focus of the Muslim cause, emphasized over and over not only that the Muslims were not provoked on the big day but that they couldn’t even see the Hindu crowds. But between massing and fighting an event happened that ended once and for all any hope of nonviolence and reconciliation: a structure on the Tarkhania homestead was set afire. Who set the fire and what burned were matters for disagreement.

Arrived at the Tarkhanias’ house, the Muslims found it abandoned:

I was also with them. We went to their house, but nobody was there. The people had all gone away, even the women.

Their ardor somewhat deflated by the absence of an enemy, the Muslim crowd allowed itself to be influenced by the authorities:

They wanted to loot the things inside the house. The O. C. and Altaf-uddin were all present there. We prevented them from looting. So we pushed all the people back to our place.

We had gone a little way into the field. We looked back and saw a fire. The Hindus had themselves done it.

Until this point, Golam’s account had been surprisingly forthright. When his side struck a blow, he told it that way without equivocation. But now suddenly he insisted that this decisive moment in the history of the riot was “their” fault, not “ours”:

There was a big cow shed. The cow shed was bigger than this hut [gestures to room in which we sit]. They also set fire to a haystack at Kumar’s homestead. The Hindus had themselves done it. We understood later why they had set fire to their own cow shed and haystack. They wanted to show the public that the Mussalmans were burning down their house. “So all of you come here and save us”: this was their aim. After setting the fires, in a moment, ten thousand of them came out of hiding and gathered in the field.

We pressed the point, wanting to know how he could be so sure it was the Hindus who burned their own structures:

How did you know that it was the Hindus who started the fire? It might have been that someone among the Mussalmans remained there in hiding.

No, no, that could not be. We had taken all of them back with us. How would anyone remain behind there? Wouldn’t he be afraid? He might be killed.

We came back and they started the fire with pieces of wood.

Did you actually see them doing it?

Yes, we saw them starting the fire. Seeing the fire, we became afraid, and we withdrew some distance.

Did you see it with your own eyes that they started the fire or what?

Yes, I saw with my own eyes.

It was curious that Golam so insisted on this point. The Hindus, of course, were convinced Muslims had set the fire. Bhupendranath told us:

Muslims attacked the Hindus first, and we Hindus took refuge in the southern part of the Hindu areas. One Hindu house was set ablaze.

Even other Muslims we interviewed were sure their own side had done the deed. Altaf told us:

I was taking the cows back, when all of a sudden I saw the Muslims attack the Hindus’ house and set the haystack on fire.

But Golam was not to be shaken. This was the crucial act of provocation, and it went beyond his capacity to accept responsibility. To him, it was a Machiavellian deed intended to rally the Namasudras to fight back.

Who exactly set the fire?

They were Kumar Tarkhania and Sidheshwar Tarkhania. Having started the fire, they gave a loud call to those who were nearby to rush to their aid. And in a moment about ten thousand people gathered and attacked us.

But the people on our side were greater in number; they were nearly fifteen thousand. They didn’t budge from their position. They sat down in a line [across the field]. The Hindus advanced a little and then they, too, sat down in a line. There was an empty space. It was as if there were a canal, with two parties sitting on the two sides of it. A group sat on that side of the canal, a group sat on this side of the canal, and the space between them was empty.

Without organization, without command, these many thousands of men knew exactly what to do. They rushed each other, but did not attack. Instead, they sat, immovable, in tidy lines, as if there were a canal separating them. Not a river or a stream, but a canal. What distinguishes a canal from any other waterway is how straight it is. The lines were drawn with precision; thousands of heavily armed men, fighting mad, sitting in the field in serried ranks.

Meanwhile, more warriors continued to arrive. They came from greater and greater distances, from towns and villages in neighboring subdivisions. Everyone had contact with people from some distant place, especially from Gopalganj, an area some thirty miles away that had had its share of communal friction. Some came from reputedly peaceful regions, too, like Tariapur, about ten miles to the east. By now rumors were flying, and many of the newcomers thought an entire village had been burned down. Muslims were sure it was a Muslim village. Incensed as that news must have made them, they nonetheless joined the tacitly agreed-upon action—they sat:

So we sat in lines. Our matabbars told us to sit around our houses in such a way as to prevent them from being destroyed by the Hindus. Their matabbars also told them to sit round their houses in the same way, with the same aim.

The positions were overtly defensive, but they also had the character of an aggressive face-off. The main form of battle was sedentary. On the fringes, however, more active combat took place. According to Altaf:

There wasn’t any big attack; only a few people chasing each other and throwing rocks at each other. On one side of the field, people were chasing each other, but in the larger part, both parties were sitting facing each other.

And Golam essentially concurred:

But on the western side, their people started chasing ours, and our people started chasing them. The fight had already started on the western side. The Hindus were sitting on the southern side, and the Mussalmans were sitting on the northern side.…

The Mussalmans on the north were chasing the Namas who were on the south, and the Namas on the south were chasing the Mussalmans on the north.

Poor Golam was carried along, despite himself, on these waves of activity:

I had to go with them. They kept asking, “Where is the shalar po shala who started the whole thing? Keep that fellow by our side.” So they kept me by their side, and I was with them.…

My hands were empty. They were armed. I would go behind them, and return behind them. My arm was already wounded, and I was afraid that I might get hurt again. I had no intention of fighting. I had no interest in fighting. I didn’t have the strength. Still, I was with them. What else could I do?

Violence and Restraint

Every account we heard emphasized that the major activity was “chasing and counter-chasing,” although occasionally men did come to blows:

Chasing and counter-chasing started at noon, and it continued for a long time. As a result, many people were injured. Many people were injured, some were sent to hospital, but nobody was killed. Some went to the doctor’s dispensary.

The history-tellers tended to downplay actual bloodshed. Perhaps they felt some shame, or, more likely, worried that even now they might be held accountable. But even allowing for this tendency, it was strikingly clear that nobody died from any of this fighting.

All along, the leaders had in mind a particular kind of fight, one played out within constraints. Throughout, they used their authority to contain violence within acceptable boundaries. But they were not in complete control of events. As Golam told us:

At that time, I was standing there. The police officer called me. He asked me what I thought should be done.

“Cool it out and ease the tension.”

The O. C. said, “We have no power to ease the tension.”

When I asked whether Altaf-uddin couldn’t have stopped the riot, Nayeb Ali promptly replied:

No, he couldn’t. Who listens to whom? Nobody was listening even to the police, forget about Altaf-uddin.

The crowd was impressively armed; they carried knives and spears and swords and scythes. Yet all wounds we heard about and scars we saw were on the arms and legs. It is hard to believe that a crowd could have been sufficiently controlled by an unarmed leadership to prevent a single killing had the people themselves not been less than murderous.

The line between fisticuffs and murder is a distinct one. Rudé has classified riots that way:

Destruction of property…is a constant feature of the pre-industrial crowd, but not the destruction of human lives, which is more properly associated with the jacqueries, slave revolts, peasant rebellions, and millenarial outbursts of the past, as it is with the race riots and communal disturbances of more recent times.…The famous “blood-lust” of the crowd is a legend, based on a few carefully selected incidents.^[8]

In fact, communal riots were sometimes bloody and sometimes not. Only eight years before the cow ate the lentils, the first major communal slaughter had blighted Calcutta, and bloody clashes had occurred in numbers of Bengali cities from then on. Such bloodshed was considered an urban phenomenon; rural riots usually involved greater numbers and lower mortality.^[9] But, four years after the first slaughter in Calcutta, uncounted numbers of Hindus had been massacred about fifty miles from Panipur, in a rural town called Muladi. The Panipur riot, though, had all the earmarks of a “pre-industrial” event rather than a true communal confrontation or a peasant rebellion.

We might note parenthetically that Rudé’s characterization of race riots as murderous is not uniformly accurate either. The Kerner Report, for instance, commented in the late 1960s that the riots they studied “involved action…against symbols of white American society—authority and property—rather than against white persons.”^[10] Another counterexample is the very serious riots that happened in Brixton, England, in 1981. Sparked by a long series of confrontations between police and people from the black community, when the furies were finally loosed they burned hot. Fire bombs were thrown, property burned and looted, battles fought between youths and authorities. In the end, over 200 vehicles and 145 buildings were damaged or destroyed; there were 7,300 police on the scene and 354 arrests. Four hundred and fifty people were injured, many of them police. But there were no fatalities.^[11] To be sure, other riots—communal riots in India and Bangladesh, racial riots in America and England—have been bloody. But a more refined theory is needed if we are to understand why these American, British, and Bengali riots were not, given that all were so passionate and in some respects so violent.

If the Panipur crowd was not murderous, still the weapons they used suggest some fairly serious intent, if not to damage, then certainly to intimidate. Many people picked up whatever was close to hand. Having at each other with functional farm implements suggests spontaneity, a quarrel arising from the normal activities of village life. Powers of invention were such that almost every implement of rural function—scythes, knives, fishing spears, lathi, mallets—could be and was turned to violent use. “There was not even a stick in my hand,” Golam said about the first physical encounter of the quarrel. “When they moved toward me with the sickles in their hands, I picked up a mallet that I had used to tether the cows, fearing that they might attack me with the sickles.”

But not all weapons that appeared in the Panipur riot were farm tools. Two other categories of weapons with particular significance also appeared in people’s accounts. First were the ram deos, huge curved knives used by Muslims during religious festivals, especially Eid, when animals are sacrificed. Not only are these knives threatening in appearance, but they have historically been put to controversial use. Many Muslims told us how resentful their community had been for many long years because the local Hindu zamindar prohibited ritual cow slaughter in his territory. The killing of cows was a symbolic act of resistance that was of a very high order of significance, and the tool used for the sacrifice was this very ram deo.^[12]

Mr. Ghosh’s list of weapons in fact concluded with the ram deo:

[They fought] with big swords and katra, koch [both fishing implements], and ram deo.

Ram deos borne by an angry Muslim crowd may have seemed particularly threatening to the Hindus, although Golam made a point of mentioning that Hindus, too, carried them:

We then seized the Hindus’ cows and took them to our houses. They [the Hindus] ran back home. Reaching their houses, they grabbed weapons, like lathi,ram deo,dhal.

The fact is that most objects in Bengal, however laden with ceremonial significance, are also used for banal purposes. One is as likely to use a ram deo to cut open a coconut as to slash the throat of a cow or a goat in ritualistic bloodshed. This mix of sacred and mundane meanings gives a sort of double-entendre effect to events like riots. What at one moment is presented humorously is the next moment ominous. Is one to hide in terror, or to root for the home team?

A second set of weapons with particular meaning were the swords and shields, implements with no function other than warfare. On the second day, according to Golam, the weapons were farm implements and ram deos:

When they took the cows away, we also came out with weapons like ram deos and scythes, and the fight began. It lasted for a long time. They attacked us with the ram deo and we fought off their attack with our ram deo. The fight lasted for two to three hours.

But the next morning, when the crowds had gathered in earnest, their seriousness was symbolized by the weapons they bore:

Then it was morning, and people of our community came with their scythes, dhal, and bolum. Many, many people came and assembled near our house. They came very early in the morning; it was still dark. They came armed with ram deos.

Bhupendranath, too, said, “They took dhal bolum.” Were Golam and Bhupendranath using a figure of speech? Where would these villagers have come by true swords and shields, implements of war? People answered vaguely, shrugging off the question. Only later did I discover that most households did in fact have these weapons secreted in their thatched roofs. They were left over from the days when peasants served as reserve soldiers for the local zamindar, and they were still carefully maintained and ceremonially used. Each year, for instance, the locality sported a boat race. Teams from various villages rowed long, narrow vessels down the canal, amid much hullabaloo and merriment. Occasionally on these race days, teams came to blows over minor disagreements. Indeed, the sport is formulated in warlike symbolism. A drum at the stern marks the rhythm, and the biggest man available, usually heavily bearded and dressed in as threatening a manner as possible, stands fiercely in the bow. Hidden in the bottoms of the boats are these dhal and bolum, rarely used but kept at hand just in case.

The appearance of these weapons on the field of action suggests another transition of importance. On one level, they represented an escalation in the contest of power gestures. The number of men massed made a statement of power. So did such specific acts as burning the cow shed. To pull the dhalbolum from the rafters and bring them along said something about a willingness to fight, despite the care everyone took not to shed too much blood. As the confrontation progressed, to be armed as fully as possible made good sense, both as aggressive gesture and as self-defense.

But a second set of meanings was conveyed by the association of the dhalbolum with past uses. They were weapons used in fulfillment of the peasants’ obligation to defend the zamindar. Because the peasants’ rights to the land they tilled were complex and had long histories, they were simultaneously defending their own rights and the communities formed around land usage. In other words, these weapons, seldom used as actual tools of war and never in the lifetimes of the current generation, nonetheless were part and parcel of complex relationships to landlord, land, and community. When they reappeared from the rafters yearly during the boat races, those old times were reevoked and redeclared. But the boat races divorced their meaning from its class roots. The races were not about landlords and tenants and obligations and land rights. Rather, they were about the village community and a unity declared through and above competition. Everyone, of whatever religion or para, took part.

That significance both carried into the riot and did not. It did in that the dhalbolum still spoke of a shared past and a past agenda. But now there were two agendas, one for each side of the confrontation. The Muslims used the weapons to say, “Now it is our turn.” But the Namasudras used them to say, “We have the right to defend ourselves.” Weapons that in the past had conveyed a unity of community both with the zamindar and against the enemy from without who threatened the zamindar’s domain now were used to pursue internecine conflict. At the same time they lent to the proceeding the dignity and legitimacy of a public occasion, like warfare, like ceremonial boat races.

Tending to the Mundane

If dhalbolum clothed the proceedings with dignity, other objects on the field of conflict reminded the participants of more banal needs:

People were cooking, bringing food to the people sitting in the field. They brought tamarind. The Hindus brought Hindu food to the Hindus. The Muslims most of the time used tamarind, so they wouldn’t be thirsty, because most of the time they couldn’t get water. The Muslims ate chal.

This description by a Hindu man suggests that, as everywhere in Indian life, food occupied an important position in the playing out of the riot. People ran to the field, taking with them their arms—and their provisions. Bhupendranath was a child at the time. What he remembered was the anger of the adults and what food they carried into battle:

They took dhalbolum; they also took moori [puffed rice], chirra [flattened rice], tetul [tamarind] to quench their thirst.

Every account contained details about the food. Nayeb Ali recalled:

In the morning I ate breakfast and went there. I came back just after the firing happened at four o’clock. In between I only ate rice.

Where did you get food? Did someone bring it from Panipur?

No, it wasn’t cooked. We had raw rice.

Mr. Ghosh had said:

There was a big mat; everybody, all the Namasudras, were bringing food there. Those who were fighting would come and grab some food.…

The Namasudras were greater in number, and they were more courageous. They had a lot of food. But the Muslims, they didn’t have much—only some chal. They would eat a handful of chal and some water. Since the Namasudras had plenty of food, they had plenty of courage.

Was it a riot or a picnic? Here again, the combination of the banal and the extraordinary is very powerful. People were playing out an exceptional drama, but they were mindful of the ordinary, too. Not only was the body fed, but rules of social behavior were observed. Food defined the group. Even though Bengali food habits and methods of cooking are similar across community lines, there are distinct markers of difference. Everyone commented on what the two sides ate: uncooked rice and tamarind for the Muslims; processed rice cereal and water for the Hindus. In the midst of mayhem, the act of eating both evoked community identities and at the same time recommitted the sides to shared understandings of the conflict.

In fact, all the acts of rioting served to intensify division, which in turn strengthened the rioters’ determination to stand firm in their confrontation. Lines were drawn more and more deeply. We asked some men who had been children whether they had had friends from the other community before the riot, and they said they had. Hindus and Muslims sat together, talking with us, side by side on a bench outside a village house. They leaned on each other’s shoulders, jostled playfully for space, interrupted and corrected each other with easy camaraderie:

Did Hindus and Muslims from this village go together [to the riot]?

No, the Hindus went from the Hindupara and the Muslims from the Muslimpara. We went to one side of the field, they to the other. Now we are friends, but at that moment we were enemies. How could we go together?

Friends were enemies, the lines drawn by every action, including what food was served to whom.

Although they were swept along on the tide of the riot, people observed social proprieties even when their hearts were not in it. Golam, seriously worried by now about the consequences of the fight in his own life, nonetheless dutifully did the needful:

I was very young, and I thought about it a lot and worried about what would happen to me in the future.…There might be a case of murder, and I would have to bear all the cost connected with it. Nobody else would pay anything.

Yet, Golam noted, by the end of the day:

No rice was left in any house in our village. It had all been eaten up. The entire stock of rice and water was exhausted, since we had to give each Mussalman a handful of rice and a little water. We had to go without food that night.

He had also been noticing what the Hindus served:

The Hindus supplied people with moori and chirra. They spread out a big piece of cloth, brought food from all the houses, and kept them there. They ate those things and drank water and fought.

Women’s Support and Resistance

Food presented an opportunity for children to participate. All the younger men we interviewed described themselves running back and forth with provisions. Women, however, whom I would have expected to be involved in food service, stayed away from the field. It was difficult to build a detailed picture of the role of women, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it was far harder to talk with them. The public world continues to be male in Bangladesh, even though some few women are active and well respected in organizations such as the one with which I was connected. I asked repeatedly to talk with women, but few interviews were arranged in advance with them. My interpreter was a young woman, selected for her gender precisely because I knew having a male coworker would foreclose any possibility of discussion with village women. Now and then we would turn an interview inward, from the front and public verandah to the women’s inner world of the courtyard. These interviews tended to be brief; men would almost always intrude, not with bad intent, but with disbelief that we could be learning anything useful from the women. Hard as we might press for the space to hear women talk, it was an uphill battle. We developed a technique; Dilruba, my interpreter and assistant, would continue the public discussion while I turned aside with the tape recorder and quietly asked the women for their views.

What we learned was that, by their own telling, women unanimously resisted the riot. Men, too, always answered questions about what their womenfolk did (whenever they overcame their incredulity that we were interested) by saying that they had tried to restrain the men from going to the field.

It was not that women lacked animosity toward the opposite community. On the contrary, they often pursued banal village battles vigorously, seeding streams, for instance, with broken pottery to keep children of the other community from fishing in their waters. Often women described friendly feelings toward women across the community divide as well, although many were isolated within their own neighborhood. But women, too, were scrappers; we heard stories of women hurling insults at each other and staunchly defending the community honor.

But when it came to overt group action the women were unconfused. Both Namasudras and Muslims pleaded with their men to stay at home, to keep the peace. Food supplied to the warriors was uncooked—raw rice for the Muslims, along with raw tamarind to control thirst; processed cereals, puffed and flattened rice, for the Hindus—a suggestion that women refused to prepare food for the gathered men. The role of women in this and other social conflicts needs more research. Where have women contributed to the hostilities (as in Ireland, for instance), and where have they resisted?

The Bangladeshi men, predictably, saw their women as passively waiting outside the process. But women took an active role as storytellers, suggesting a more autonomous position for them. It was a woman, as I’ve said, who first broke the silence of the men and told me that the riot had happened. Women in general were more articulate about their fears and grievances (I’ll say more about that later). When women kept silence and when they spoke was enlightening. I suspected that they told me what they had not told my local friends both because I was a woman and because, more important perhaps, I asked them the question. In the telling they implied criticism not only of the opposite community but also of their own menfolk. Laced through their decisions in the present to speak or not to speak, as well as what to speak, was resentment from the past about how the men escalated trouble and brought it home.

For the men did escalate the riot seriously. Foreshadowing what was to come, Golam combined his memories of the ordinary act of eating with the horror of police gunfire:

It was at two o’clock when the firing happened. They brought moori and chirra and poured them out on the sheet of cloth. The time was two o’clock; the firing took place then.

Golam placed the firing in time by linking it with the Hindus’ food service. The portrait of a spirited rivalry over menus changed abruptly as the newcomers raised the numbers to critical mass. By two o’clock the action had become more dangerous:

At last the fight started. When the people came on horseback, those who were sitting there started the chase. They ran into the village. There they caught a Hindu man. The Mussalmans struck him ten times with their weapons. He was struck in the arms and legs. The Muslim matabbars then grabbed the man to prevent him from being hit in the belly and being murdered. One of the matabbars took him to a room and kept him shut up in it.

Golam frankly held the Muslims responsible for striking the first serious blows—so serious that the matabbars feared for the Hindu’s life. It was clear that the riot was rapidly becoming intimidating:

By this time the crowd had grown to nearly thirty thousand on each side. The entire field was packed with them. There were about two hundred policemen from two police stations, including the officer in charge of Madaripur thana. They were trying hard to prevent people from fighting. They had not received any order to open fire.

The riot was spinning swiftly toward its undoing.

Notes