6. Lessons of Panipur

And so there was some trouble with cows in Panipur. A riot happened and ended and became a story, and life returned to normal. But it was a new normal, not totally unlike the old one, but different in important respects. For the villagers, the story became a morality tale, told with more or less humor, more or less regret, more or less bravado, more or less wonder, depending on the teller, the hearer, the purpose, and the moment. “How can it be?” asked Sunil. “They damage our crops, and when we protest there is this reaction. It was totally counter to the social rules.”

I, too, wondered what had happened just then to cause such a change in the “social rules.” Why had personal enmity suddenly burst into flames of collective conflict? How had neighbors come to see each other as enemies and to act on that idea? These two communities had lived peacefully for most of time. “The fact is,” Mofizuddin told me, “we Hindus and Muslims cultivate our lands in the same place. We share common borders.” Neither Sunil nor Golam seemed to me fanatically wedded to a religious viewpoint. Day-to-day life in the village revealed some predictable pigheadedness but little communal prejudice. People knew each other too well for that, knew their neighbors’ personal stories, who married whom and how he treated her, whose fortunes prospered and whose failed, whose crop was well tended and whose was neglected.

Indeed, it was just this sense of easy familiarity between communities, crossed with a certain tension ordinarily unspoken yet intuitively perceptible, that gave rise to the central questions of my research. It seemed clear that there existed a potential for hostility between members of the two communities, but there equally existed its opposite. Why conflict erupted when and as it did was not obvious. The huge explosions of communalism that had accompanied independence from Britain and the formation of Pakistan were seven years in the past. The region surrounding this village had never been heavily involved and was generally peaceful at the moment. What transpired to tip the balance?

I wanted to explore the steps from neighborliness to warfare, because it seemed likely that if we could understand how these Bengali villagers conceived their riot and their contending communities, we might learn more about how people generally “think conflict.” That is not a new inquiry. There are numbers of literatures focused on the question of why people rebel against authority, for instance.^[1] But most of these involve scenarios of dominance and submission. The question they consider is when and why people reach limits of endurance for unequal power relations. In Panipur, however, the conflict was between peers, a situation not at all uncommon. When Americans of different races clash, or ethnic minorities in Eastern Europe, or blacks in South Africa, similar challenges are presented to analytic frameworks for understanding social conflict.^[2]

Theories of Communalism

Discussions of communalism divide more or less according to three tenets of human behavior:

• People are beasts driven by innate aggressive instincts.
• People are misled into betraying their own true interests.
• People act out a drama that is meaningful within the frame of their own lives.

The first explanation parallels the viewpoint of Le Bon and Freud and rests on assumptions about unconscious antisocial forces within the human psyche. It characterizes an imperialist view of communalism: tension between Hindus and Muslims is inbred, and so ancient as to constitute unchangeable character. A British official looking back after Independence summed up this viewpoint neatly:

During the long period of inter-communal tension we were directed to form Conciliation Committees of leading Hindus and Muslims wherever the situation seemed to require it. I formed one, and there learned what our statesmen failed wholly to understand[:] that, after all the arguments have been rehearsed and considered, there remains a residue of pure prejudice, pigheadedness, fanaticism—call it what you will—which makes any solution of inter-communal disputes on rational grounds impossible and necessitates a forceful decision by an outside party. This is as true of music before mosques as it is of Kashmir, but it is a principle which neither the British Government of 1947 nor U. N. O. [United Nations Organization] assimilated. The former, starting from the assumption that we, the British, had no right to be in India[,] were thus led up the garden path to a point where the atavistic impulses of the masses took charge and wrecked the work of centuries.^[3]

At its kindest, British belief had it that these smoldering conflicts must be benevolently contained.^[4] At its worst, the English colonists saw such strains as an opportunity:

If we destroy or desecrate Mussalman Mosques or Brahmin temples we do exactly what is wanting to band the two antagonist races against ourselves.…As we must rule 150 million of people by a handful (more or less small) of Englishmen, let us do it in the manner best calculated to leave them divided (as in religion and national feeling they already are) and to inspire them with the greatest possible awe of our power and with the least possible suspicion of our motives.^[5]

“Atavistic impulses” powerfully justify a policy of divide-and-rule, especially since the people are already divided “in religion and national feeling.” The theoretical underpinnings are clear: people (at least these people) are beset by base instinct that must be tamed—or utilized—by “civilized” outside powers.

On the flip side of this self-serving British coin was a predictable nationalist response. Instead of communalist instincts justifying British rule, in this second view it was precisely British rule that created communalism. The phenomenon was wholly provoked by divide-and-rule policies.^[6] Indians, both Muslims and Hindus, were victims of a conscious policy imposed upon a population that had hitherto lived in harmony.

This view is very similar to a Marxist version that saw the masses acted upon by indigenous people seeking power: “Communalism was the false consciousness of the historical process of the last 150 years because, objectively, no real conflict between the interests of Hindus and Muslims existed,” wrote Bipan Chandra:

Communalism involved “either conscious deception or unconscious self-deception”; the communalist was either deceiving others or, more likely, he was deceiving himself as well…because the interests he claimed to represent did not exist in real life and the demands he undertook to fulfil were incapable of being fulfilled.^[7]

By implication, communalism was a mistake. It was promulgated by self-interested blackguards (the British, or communalists with particular agendas) and accepted by unconscious peoples who allowed themselves to be deceived into acting against their own true interests. To accept this explanation is to make unnecessary any inquiry into substantive reasons for clashes between communities, since it assumes there are no such reasons. But it raises the very important question of why people allow themselves to be duped.

Another variation on the same theme is an updated version that blames nationalist politicians rather than the British:

The division of India…took place due to power-mongers like Nehru and Jinnah, who were willing to risk communal riots [to further their own ends].…They put forward the idea that Hindus and Muslims could not live together, then [solved the “problem”] by dividing the country. They were happy because they succeeded in achieving their goal of ruling as heads of state.^[8]

From a vantage point almost half a century post-Partition, the British seem less likely villains than do the politicians who have so badly failed, in the view of this correspondent, to solve the pressing problems of nationhood.

But the underlying theory is the same: people are somehow duped into acting against their own interests. There is something about humankind, according to the implicit assumption, that creates a vulnerability to deception. Unwilling to ascribe such passivity to the common man, some post-Independence scholars constructed a third position that challenged the very idea that inter-community conflict was a problem. They reframed the discussion, removing normative assessments and painting communalism as a constructive process. Ethnic conflict was simply another way to negotiate demands and power, wrote N. C. Saxena:

Communal movements, especially of minority groups, can be seen as a form of social movements which are “organised attempts of a group to bring about change in the face of resistance from other groups or the government through collective mobilisation based on an ideology.” Such movements can foster self-esteem and pride within a group which subsequently hasten economic growth and all-round development of that group.^[9]

Saxena’s theory mirrored an American sociological argument of the 1950s, in which some writers cast conflict as a positive event and contesters as contributing to the social process.^[10] To see community conflicts as social movements is a positive contribution, because it allows us to ask a set of questions that are irrelevant if people are either beasts or dupes: What is the goal of a given confrontation? Why is it happening now? Why in this form?

The problem with Saxena’s theory, however, is that, while it dignifies human beings, it fails to emphasize the unequal power arrangements within which they live out their lives. Saxena is thereby led to eclipse some very important differences between “other groups” and government. That rebellious peasants may be massacred by government bullets diminishes the esteem-generating benefits of protest. Ruling elites, meanwhile, remain protected, not only from physical force but also from the political imperatives of a disenfranchised people. Indeed, it is within this paradigm of powerlessness that phenomena such as communalism emerge as means to negotiate power. Exactly how and why that happens is the concern at hand. Although his description of communalism as social movement helpfully challenges conventional wisdom codified behind walls of value judgment, Saxena leaves himself no way to address that central question.

What Saxena does do is to lead us to questions of agency. To see communal conflict as a meaningful process of working out issues genuinely relevant to the lives of those involved is to see the actors as central to their own drama. The questions we are considering become very fundamental ones, not just about how two groups of peasants came to blows, but about how people engage their own historic fates.

Ideas about where the individual fits into the process of making history have been hotly debated by historians and activists for a very long time.^[11] Broadly stated, there are two opposite theories: that history is a series of momentous deeds by great leaders, or that abstract material dynamics are the force driving social change. Marx and his followers argued the latter position, because they opposed the idea that progress was the property of elite men. That power was controlled by small numbers of upper-class rulers was a phenomenon of particular periods of history, they contended, but not an inevitable fact of life. Ordinary working people could take power, indeed would take power as dynamics produced by economics and technology necessitated that change.^[12] Their viewpoint opened a space for revolutionary activism, but it also gave rise to several theoretical problems. If history is the inevitable outcome of abstract forces, where is the motivation or place for willed action by living humans? If ordinary folk can take power, why have they not? It was to answer this latter question that theories of false consciousness (such as Bipan Chandra’s) were proposed, but they in turn implied a passive naiveté among the masses that did not ring true to many activists and thinkers.

Some Indian historians gathered in a school of thought called Subaltern Studies have recently confronted this dilemma by objecting, as does Saxena, to views of common people as either dupes or beasts. But they go beyond Saxena in rejecting his neutrality and positing a world polarized by power inequities and injustices. Colonized nations suffered a three-tiered power structure. On top were the imperialists; in India, these were the British. Next came the local elites, who also formed the core of the nationalist revolt. Below were the subaltern masses—peasants, workers, laborers. Rewriting history from the perspective of the bottom gives new meanings to events like communalism:

By making the security of the state into the central problematic of peasant insurgency, [colonial historiography] assimilated the latter as merely an element in the career of colonialism. In other words, the peasant was denied recognition as a subject of history in his own right even for a project that was all his own.…Even when a writer was apparently under no obligation to think like a bureaucrat affected by the trauma of a recent jacquerie, he was conditioned to write the history of a peasant revolt as if it were some other history—that of the Raj, or of Indian nationalism, or of socialism, depending on his particular ideological bent. The result…has been to exclude the insurgent as the subject of his own history.^[13]

Subalternists draw deeply on the work of the Italian revolutionary Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci sought to reconcile the paradox of human agency in a history driven by material forces; he did so by exploring the role of ideas, which he placed in the realm of social relations of power.^[14] Culture, he claimed, is controlled by those in power and produces a hegemonic, or dominating, philosophy; indeed, it dictates the range of consciousness within which debate and inquiry can take place. Dominant classes thus rule, not by the gun, but by the power of ideas. Gramsci was much influenced by Marx’s formulation, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”^[15]

Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz took the investigation of culture and ideas further, looking at the socially generated nature of cultural institutions, including that most natural-seeming set of ideas called common sense, which Gramsci had made problematic.^[16] Geertz also studied religion as culture, a discussion to which I’ll return below.^[17] Diminished in the anthropological approach, however, were the questions of power that most interested Gramsci. Geertz gave us a nuanced and more encompassing understanding of the institutions Gramsci identified as hegemonic, but he himself delved little into the manner in which they in fact exercised hegemony over the willingness of individuals to comply with power or to protest.

Many Subalternists use sophisticated tools of cultural analysis in their effort to engage the debate, although they tend to shy away from explorations of the terrain of individual consciousness and community dialogue. Culture is for them a coin used in transactions of power. But the nature of the transaction as perceived by the insurgent herself remains mysterious. Since they tend to view matters from a perspective other than that of the actors, what they can say about the nature of the subaltern masses as subjects is limited.

Clearly, those who do not wield state power are severely constrained by oppressive institutions, an observation at the heart of notions of false consciousness. Yet they are also capable of exercising will and creativity in shaping their world, as both Saxena and the Subalternists recognize. How are we to resolve that contradiction? It is my attempt in this work to explore the ways people who are relatively powerless take power, or, more accurately, negotiate it, within the limitations of institutional arrangements they cannot effectively challenge. We can define a fourth position in the debate about communalism, an elaboration of Saxena’s view: People act out a particular drama, attempting to renegotiate rights and powers in forms limited and distorted by oppression. The particular frame in which they engage in meaningful struggles, that is to say, is constituted by unequal power relations that constrain the spaces within which they can move toward well-being.

The riot in Panipur was an upheaval, not a revolution. It did not question fundamental social structures such as property relations, because those relations as such were not up for negotiation. But within those structures it did rearrange power. Once we view it as a renegotiation of rights and privileges, we can begin to address the question of why it took a communal form on a more subtle level, the level of the consciousness and interests of players who were very much its subjects. The inquiry now moves into a territory between the poles of the Subalternist analysis—structure and culture—placing the individuals who compose those collectivities at the center of the study.

A Matter of Method

The Panipur riot has several characteristics that make it especially useful for this project. One reason studies of the internal landscape of social conflict are few and far between has to do with the problem of method, well described by Sandria Freitag: “Crowd behavior…is a problematic historical topic, for we cannot know the thoughts of the individuals who make up a crowd.”^[18] When people produce no written records (and, historically, writing has been a luxury of elites), the only way to know their thoughts is to ask the individuals concerned, an enterprise made impossible beyond a limited stretch of time and hard enough in any case. The drama in Panipur was recent enough to allow oral accounts by participants to be readily available, yet it was far enough in the past for its causes and consequences to be digested and defined. It was a finite event, arising at one identifiable moment and ending at another. I could therefore study it in satisfying detail.

Even more, the riot provided a focal point upon which different stories coalesced. From studying the differences among accounts we can learn much about the processes of formulation. Because it was an unusual event in the history of Panipur—nobody there had ever rioted before—memories were sharp and dramatic, symbolic grains around which ideological conclusions had crystallized.

Indeed, village riots as a category were rare in East Bengal. As I have noted before, overt communal warfare was believed to be an urban phenomenon. Some rural incidents had occurred before the mid-1950s, but they tended to be relatively minor.^[19] In the cities, however, personal passions had collided with diverse political agendas, creating explosions of violence in which many thousands died; by the mid-1950s a large section of the urban Bengali population had been personally touched by violence between the communities. The massive slaughters of the late 1940s were city-based. Villagers had heard stories of that violence; many interviewees told me of a relative or friend injured in Calcutta, or of someone caught in a distant city when all hell had broken loose. But their own villages had not been visited with such mayhem. The Panipur riot thus has the virtues of virginity; the villagers may have been touched by stories from elsewhere, but they themselves had no tradition of rioting on this scale. The experience of conflict alters forever how people feel about each other, as well as how they experience themselves as Muslim or Hindu or whatever, and how they calculate their options to act. In Panipur, people were having that experience for the first time.

Much of the urban history of community conflict was intertwined with traditions of political organizing. Mass campaigns to recruit people to a point of view, to join a nationalist campaign or support a day of advocacy for the formation of Pakistan, for instance, were frequent. But the infamous “outside organizer,” that mythic culprit blamed so regularly when “innocent masses” rebel all over the world, was absent from Panipur. It was not that organizers had never worked the area. Indeed, Faridpur district is known as a familiar arena for communist organizing, as well as being the home of well-established dacoits, or bandits, perhaps the most organized groups of all.^[*] But in no account did anyone ever contend that a stranger stirred up tempers or engineered action, and that is unusual in histories of contentious activity. To trace through stories of outside agitators would be a very useful exercise, but that they did not figure in accounts of the Panipur riot lends its study a simplicity that allows us to focus on the local people themselves.

There is yet another sense in which the Panipur riot represents a “pure” example of the genre. Not only in its enactment but also in its recollection it was isolated from outside influence to an uncommon degree. Nowhere was the story of Panipur publicized. When in our over-reported world do we have an opportunity to build a mental picture uninfluenced by the media? I found myself in the very unusual circumstance of constructing a history exclusively from the accounts of participants. Not only was my mental movie of the riot free of anything I had read or heard about it outside the village, but the Panipur people’s own recollection was similarly insulated. What we “know” of something like a public gathering is usually compounded of our own experience and the stories told by others about that experience. Some of those stories are “official,” either actually so—the reconstructions of police and courts and administrators—or made official in spirit through the power of the electronic or printed word. Few Bengali villagers are literate, but written material nonetheless finds its way into community consciousness through transactions with literate others. For instance, had the riot been known to the development workers of the area, educated people who today represent a major link between village and city, the people of Panipur would have had reflected back to them other views of their own history. Newcomers would have asked questions about it, and those questions would have suggested judgments and opinions. The organization’s programs might even have been influenced, however subtly, by anxiety about a possible repetition of the event. In many ways, overt and unstated, the experience of the villagers would have engaged the reactions of the outsiders and would have been altered in the process.

I was hearing stories composed of direct sensation and firsthand discussion, an ideal circumstance for studying the thought processes and interactions of the people involved. To be sure, the riot was well digested within the village community. Nobody’s recollection was exactly pristine. Everybody had heard others’ accounts and had recited their own often enough to have transformed raw experience into a good tale. But the layers of consciousness created by nonimmediate sources, by written reports and electronic depictions and the responses of outsiders, were missing from my introduction to the Panipur story. Consequently, I could listen with more simplicity to the processes of formulation of the conflict by those involved. I could also track more cleanly the lines of storytelling to subsequent generations, the ways the tale of the wayward cow and its consequences helped to shape community relations after the event.^[20]

[*] An often-quoted jingle describes Faridpur: “Chur chotta khajuria ghur/A niya Faridpur.” (Thieves, cheats, date molasses,/These things are Faridpur.)

Lessons of Panipur

What can we learn about the concoction of the Panipur riot from the stories I was told? Long before I reached Panipur, I had formed a number of opinions. I believed that people were not uncivilized beasts whose base instincts erupted as soon as society’s control weakened. Although I could see that disinformation existed, both in the form of generalizations about the intentions of ocne group or another and also as rumors, I was not prepared to accept that the villagers had been duped. It seemed clear to me that the process of two groups coming to blows involved a good deal of interaction among people in communities they defined for themselves, and that those communities included influential leaders, but I suspected the process was more complex than a simple dynamic of leaders dictating actions to obedient followers. While I knew that religion figured into the story, at the very least as the formal basis for sorting out communities, it was hard for me to believe these fights were in fact religious conflicts.

What seemed to me to need explaining was why the communities became defined as they did, why conflict occurred when and as it did, and why the individuals composing the communities did or did not join in. As I studied the interviews, three conclusions emerged:

1. The villagers chose to riot. They were not swept mindlessly away on tides of passion, nor were they forced by circumstances to behave in ways destructive to their interests, although both passion and circumstance figured into their decisions.
2. Decision-making was a process located in communities that themselves were chosen and reconstituted for the purposes of action. In the heat of conflict, why the villagers looked to associations defined by religious identity rather than any of the several other groupings available to them is not obvious and must be explained by examining both cultural and historically specific meanings attached to the communities.
3. The decision to riot was deeply informed by an awareness of history understood in terms of lived experience. The act of rioting integrated the village into a moment of national transformation which until then had been abstract and distant. In so doing, the rioters brought change home to the village and thus took their place in the making of their own history.

Let us look at each of these contentions in more detail.

Notes