Twelve
The Politics of Communalism

The emergence of communal politics during the 1920s could hardly have been foreseen by the most astute observer of the local scene in the previous decade. During the entire colonial period between 1800 and World War I, there had never been a major incident of communal strife between Hindus and Muslims. Indeed, the most serious episode of violence that one might call communal had been a clash between Shia Muslim Daudi Bohras and Sunni Muslims over a celebration of Muharram in 1910.^[1] In general, both Hinduism and Islam loosely bound a great diversity of social groupings rather than defined coherent communities poised for political action. In the civic arena, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims had ever come together as a community for any purpose whatsoever. "Muslim" politics was the preserve of members of a tiny elite, mostly descendants of the old Mughal nobility, who had sought to perpetuate their niche in the colonial order as the natural leaders of their religious group. These families had founded Muslim political associations, supported Muslim education, and participated in imperial rituals as headmen of their religious group. Just before the war, they had become increasingly interested in pan-Islamic concerns, expressing their concern to the imperial administration, for instance, about the threat to the Ottoman caliph posed by the Balkan wars,^[2] and imploring the government to aid Indian pilgrims traveling on the hajj.^[3] They had not, however, endeavored to organize their coreligionists in their attempts to influence British rulers. Most persons in Surat who professed Islam were as much shut out of Muslim politics as the larger population of the city was excluded from public life.

By the late 1920s, the political scene in Surat had changed radically. Questions of religious community entered the civic arena dramatically. Tensions between Hindus and Muslims built up in the city, culminating

in a series of bloody riots between 1927 and 1929 that left nearly a dozen Surtis dead, causing most politicians in the city to identify openly as representatives of their religious communities. In the aftermath of these riots, the city was so polarized along religious lines that cooperation between the two communities was precluded for the remainder of the colonial era. The politics of the late 1920s undermined the possibility for a truly intercommunal leadership.

Such developments may seem especially paradoxical because this era of communal conflict immediately followed the most intense period of Hindu-Muslim unity in national politics, the noncooperation movement of 1920–24. But on closer examination, this paradox disappears. In a way not intended by the noncooperators, the anticolonialism of Gandhian politics conspired with hegemonic processes associated with colonialism to produce two distinct religious consciousnesses, one Hindu, one Muslim. The sociological understandings that informed noncooperation reinforced colonial discursive assumptions in producing communally oriented loyalties. Ultimately the logic of Gandhian discourse contained within it tendencies that undermined efforts to achieve communal harmony and that deflected attempts to confront the liberal representative order.

World War I and Muslim Politics

The widening of specifically Muslim preoccupations in the civic arena was in part an outgrowth of the wartime crisis. Between 1914 and 1919, many Muslims of Surat, like many Hindus, suffered from inflation, new municipal policies, higher taxes, and restrictions on trade. Perhaps recognizing the saliency of appeals to religious sentiment in the colonial context, Muslim groupings increasingly defended themselves against these intrusive developments by evoking the language of Islamic principle and of community in their petitions to the government. Surat's butchers, upset at new municipal bylaws that would restrict their business activities to well-defined markets, argued that the measures would prohibit acts of sacrifice in homes, thus forcing women living in purdah to abstain from celebrating important Muslim occasions.^[4] Masud Alam Khan, head of the Nawab of Bela family, objected to new housing regulations by suggesting that Muslims might be especially affected: "The Municipal Commissioner is acting against the feelings and sentiments of a large majority of the people of Surat, particularly of the Mahomedan community, in not allowing them to construct or reconstruct privies in the upper floors of their homes." ^[5] Clearly, one way of responding to the intrusion of the provincial and local administrations into previously inviolate areas of local life was to

represent one's own concerns as being the grievance of a religious minority that the British had a special duty to protect.

In some instances, it was possible to detect more narrow personal and group interests underlying the rhetoric of community. But a few municipal measures during these years clearly affected the religious sensibilities of many of the city's Muslims. In 1913, for instance, the local body had passed a bylaw calling for restrictions against overcrowding in cemeteries, for clear demarcation of graves, and for the registration of all burials. The managers of local burial places, whose incomes were directly endangered by the measure, were particularly alarmed by the new regulations. But many other Muslims, fearing that the practice of burying their dead in family graves was in danger, also reacted strongly. Islamic scholars took up the cause, asserting, according to the second-hand account of one British officer, that the "Koran is full of prohibitions against anything like a demarcation of a grave or the counting of the number of graves in a burial ground." ^[6] The heads of the Edrus, Bakza, Nawab of Surat, and Nawab of Bela families eventually persuaded the municipality and the district collector to drop the most worrisome of the new laws.

A more serious instance occurred in 1920 after it was discovered that the municipality had built a public urinal in Kelapith on a location thought to have once been the site of a mosque. A number of leaderships in the city, including members of the gentry, Islamic scholars, and a few Muslim professionals, organized a movement to have the urinal removed and a mosque restored on the spot. At one point in the struggle, Muslim merchants offered to buy the site; on another, the Muslims asked the municipality to grant the community the plot of land. The local body, however, remained largely unresponsive to both approaches. Its intransigence prompted the Muslim community, in a meeting headed by Nasrullah Khan of the Nawab of Surat family and Sheikh Ali Bakza of the Bakza family, to draft a "monster" petition to the council. Containing nearly five thousand signatures, the petition complained that "the religious feelings and susceptibilities [of the Muslims] have been greatly wounded by the majority of the Hindu councillors strongly opposing the granting of the plot of land for the purpose of a mosque." ^[7] When the issue came before the municipality for final consideration, the council agreed not to approve any new construction on the site but referred the matter of how to dispose of the land to the sanitary committee, essentially killing the possibility that a mosque would ever be built there. All the Muslim members of the municipality walked out of the meeting hall in protest. The issue of the Kelapith mosque simmered for months before being overwhelmed by the affairs of the Khilafat movement.

As dissatisfactions with government and municipal policy grew, the most prominent Muslim families found it increasingly difficult to preserve their status as natural leaders through old political methods. The descendants of the Mughal nobility had come to pride themselves on their reputation for loyalty to empire and were extremely reluctant to take actions that could jeopardize their special relations with imperial officials. But many underclass Muslims were no longer content to allow a collaborating leadership to act as community spokesmen. Surat's collector warned provincial officers at the time of the burial grounds movement that "if they are betrayed by their leaders, the mob is quite capable of being stimulated to disorder on the instigation of the persons who derive their profits from these graveyards."^[8] Like other older elites in the city, the Muslim gentry struggled to maintain its credibility in the face of this growing undercurrent of resistance.

These pressures from below made possible serious challenges to the dominance of the Muslim notables from men who had never before exercised any significant influence in the civic arena. While the old elite was drawn exclusively from the ranks of immigrant Muslims, the new contenders included several figures from convert communities. Most prominent among these people were Sheikh Ali Hamdani, a Daudi Bohra trader, and Muhammad Afzal Narmawala, a Patani Bohra and a graduate of Aligarh Muslim University. Both were attracted to the program of the Home Rule League and supported the Lucknow alliance between the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League. During the later war years, they and their supporters began to organize meetings in Surat to protest government policy on a number of Muslim issues. In November 1917, for instance, they held a meeting attended by perhaps fifteen hundred Muslims to pass resolutions against the arrest of the militant Muslim brothers from North India, Mohamed Ali and Shaukat Ali, and to organize a chapter of the Muslim League in the city.^[9]

The more established gentry families clearly felt threatened by these activities and redoubled their own efforts to reassert community leadership. In order to deflate the claims of Narmawala and his followers, however, members of the older Muslim elite had to abandon their quiet, deferential political style and show that they, too, commanded the support of their coreligionists. Several days after the meeting to protest the Ali brothers' arrest, Sayyid Ali Edrus, president of the local Anjuman-e-Islam, organized a countermeeting to register community objections to the Congress-League pact and to the activities of the Home Rule League. He later claimed that twenty-three prominent Muslim leaders had called the meeting and that more than two thousand Muslims had supported resolutions introduced there.^[10] The nota-

bles also began to revitalize the Mahomedan Union—which had not met for several years—recruiting new members and raising substantial funds for Muslim education in the city.^[11] They took up such causes as that of the Muslim burial grounds, the Kelapith mosque, Islamic education in primary schools, and orphanages for Muslim children. Seemingly, then, the challenge of Narmawala and his supporters prompted many of the prominent notable families to intensify their efforts to sustain recognition as Muslim leaders. By the beginning of noncooperation, the conflicts of the war period had already led to the heightened significance of religious identity in civic politics.

Gandhian Politics and Islamic Identity

It was in this context, as the rhetoric of religious community began to find a larger and more constant audience in the city, that Gandhian politics began to influence Muslim political action. Though directed toward building united agitation against the British, the noncooperation movement actually strengthened the importance of communal preoccupations for Hindu and Muslim alike, making possible the era of violent conflict of the later 1920s. Acting and thinking politically as members of a religious community, which before the war had not been a reflexive action for most Surtis, quickly became engrained as common sense.

The sharpening of the boundaries between Hindus and Muslims was at least indirectly an outgrowth of the application of Gandhian conceptions to local politics. Through the very attempt to combat negative British characterizations of Indian society, Gandhi was almost compelled to accept some of the categories and assumptions of colonial analysis.^[12] The Mahatma, of course, rejected the imperial premise that religious groupings in India were antagonistic communities inevitably at odds with each other. Hindus and Muslims, he asserted, were the "two eyes of the country"; cooperation between the two was possible if each community would respect the feelings of the other. But in arriving at this counterhegemonic contention, he essentially acknowledged key precepts of colonial discourse: that particular scriptures were the chief defining features of Indian religion, that religious affiliation was the most important sociological principle around which Indian society was organized, that those who belonged to a specific religious grouping shared important common political interests, and that these interests were at least partially distinct from those of persons who professed other faiths. In some of his writings, Gandhi even seemed to accept the notion that religious identity was the most critical source of conflict in Indian society. Hindus, he observed in his journal Young India, tended

to resent the killing of cows by Muslims, while Muslims held similar objections about certain Hindu practices. Only by sincere expressions of mutual respect and self-denial could such differences be overcome. In order to deserve self-rule, Indians would have to manage their antagonisms and prove that they were capable of working with each other.^[13] Whatever the validity of these understandings for the rest of India, they did not at all capture the reality of Surat's society, which had never been organized along the lines of religion (as defined in terms of scriptural communities) and where killing cows or playing music before mosques had not become significant political issues. But since Gandhian thinking informed the shape of local noncooperation in very serious ways, it subtly came to influence self-definitions of political actors in Surat, both Hindu and Muslim.

Gandhi perceived himself to be a leader primarily able to command the support of Hindus, and he eagerly sought out Islamic causes in order to cement a symbolic alliance between his community and the Muslims against the colonial administration.^[14] Soon after his return to India from South Africa in 1915, he developed ties with the Ali brothers and their religious teacher, Abdul Bari of Lucknow. By 1919, the three men had persuaded him that Indian Muslims regarded the Ottoman sultan as the khalifa, that is, as the temporal and spiritual head of the Islamic world, and that the community thus deeply resented the Allies' attempts to dismember the Ottoman Empire. They also provided him with conclusive proof that the British had violated wartime promises to uphold the sultan's authority over the Islamic holy lands of the Middle East. Opposition to British treatment of the khalifa, Gandhi realized, was one he could use to deflate colonial claims to be the protectors of India's minorities and to demonstrate the ability of the country's religious groupings to support each other. Hoping to integrate Muslim politics with the politics of satyagraha, he offered the Ali brothers his help in generating a wider backing for the Khilafat cause. At the same time, he encouraged Muslim leaders to act as spokesmen for their community and to intensify their protests against British policy toward Turkey. Thus, he envisioned a larger movement in which it would be possible for distinct religious groups to fight together under the umbrella of nationalism at least in part for distinct religious causes.^[15]

In Surat, the noncooperators, following the lead of the Mahatma, accepted the importance of the Khilafat issue and granted Muslims a separate place as Muslims within their already powerful movement. The Gandhians in the city perceived themselves as addressing mainly Hindus and Jains. They left the appeal for Muslim support largely to a distinct group of Muslim political leaders who were already eager to challenge the British on the Khilafat issue and who could rouse the

religious sentiment of the community. In a process not unlike colonial efforts to assure Muslims representation on local and provincial bodies, the local Congress created its own informal system of "reserved" places for Muslims and encouraged Muslim aspirants to leadership to take up Islamic issues self-consciously in their politics.^[16]

Activist Muslims led by Muhammad Afzal Narmawala, the proponent of the Muslim League, quickly moved into the slots provided for Muslims within noncooperation. Many had long identified with the plight of the sultan and now found a means of defending their khalifa's position within an already powerful movement squarely located in the civic arena. Narmawala soon developed into one of Surat's leading Khilafatists, becoming increasingly outspoken in his pan-Islamic and anti-British statements. Miasaheb Fejullabhai Hamdani, a Daudi Bohra educationist involved in serious conflicts with the leaders of the Bohra community, was another Muslim leaguer who embraced the Khilafat cause. Narmawala and Hamdani were joined by a number of other persons who had never participated in the municipal-national arena before: merchants, Islamic scholars, and a few others of diverse backgrounds. The most important of these was Sayyid Ahmed Edrus, a member of the so-called lesser branch of Surat's prestigious Edrus family, a family with its own shrine and a reputation for performing miracles. Edrus had been an official in the excise department of the Bombay administration until 1920, when he dramatically resigned his post in protest against British treatment of Turkey.^[17] He quickly assumed a leading role in organizing Surat's Muslims as well as the presidency of the Surat District Congress Committee.

As a gesture of unity with the Hindus, the Muslim leadership chose as president of the local Khilafat committee M. M. Rayaji, a Nagar Brahman and a prominent member of the Home Rule League. Rayaji's main functions in the movement, however, were to secure Hindu support for this Muslim cause rather than to exert an overarching leadership. He clearly directed his appeal on the Khilafat issue to a Hindu audience. "Hindus and Muslims, the two great communities of India," he argued in one public address, "are like two limbs of a body. Just as other parts of the body feel pain when one limb is injured, it is the duty of Hindus to help Muslims when they suffer a blow to their religion."^[18] On occasion, his rhetoric raised questions about the past that some Muslims must have certainly found offensive: "This question [of the Khilafat] is one of religion and religion is dear to every man. . .. Those who know history know that when Muslims attacked Hindu kingdoms, Brahmans and Hindus willingly gave up their lives for the sake of their religion."^[19] Rayaji's tenure as president was also a very brief one. In late 1920, after the Calcutta Congress demanded the boycott of legislative

councils, he abandoned his role on the committee, and like most home rulers, retired temporarily from civic politics. Given the understandings of politics that he entertained as leader of the Khilafat committee, his later reincarnation as the city's most ardent communalist hardly seems surprising. After his departure, leadership of the movement was assumed by a heterogeneous set of Muslim men who occupied a separate place in noncooperation, complementing the Gandhians but remaining distinct from them.

Between 1919 and 1922, Narmawala and the other Muslim activists developed a distinct Muslim political rhetoric that allowed them both to confront British power and to appeal to their coreligionists. Their language was markedly different from that of the Hindu noncooperators. While the Gandhians spoke a Gujarati laced with Sanskrit-derived words, Khilafatists addressed their audiences in Urdu or a highly Urduized Gujarati. The reading of poems in Urdu or Persian on the khalifa was a regular feature of their meetings.^[20] A jari worker, Gani Dahinwala, achieved some local repute as a composer of Urdu poems stressing the obligation of Muslims to support the khalifa.^{[ 21]}

In speeches at public meetings, the Khilafatists emphasized panIslamic ideals, fashioning a universalistic faith that was divorced from the everyday religious practice of most specific Muslim groupings in the city but that nonetheless tapped symbols common to all members of the community. Besides the khalifa, the most important of these symbols was the Quran. Muslim leaders repeatedly drew upon the Islamic scriptures in asserting the justice of their cause. In a talk given on the Khilafat Day held in March 1920, Fejullabhai Hamdani condemned writers in England who had claimed few Muslims really cared about the fate of the sultan, warning that "it is written in the Koran that God's disgrace is on him who is untruthful."^[22] Narmawala, addressing the same meeting, defiantly asserted that it was an inescapable Quranic obligation for Muslims to keep the holy lands of Arabia free from non-Muslim control, even if they had to sacrifice their own lives.^[23] Sayyid Ahmed Edrus employed similar logic in a letter he wrote to the Bombay Chronicle:

Laws of Islam are unalterable and no Muslim can excuse himself from performing what has been imposed on him by God in the Koran, and by the Prophet in Hadith. If . . . [he] does, he ceases to be a Muslim.

Maintenance of the sanctity of jaziratul Arab [the Islamic holy lands] and Khilafat are the religious impositions on Muslims and therefore no Muslim can tolerate subjugation of either by any non-Muslim power.^[24]

The Khilafatists thus formulated a distinct language and distinct moral principles applying only to members of their religious commu-

nity. They shaped an Islam that allowed Muslims to cooperate with Hindus without being completely absorbed by the larger movement.

The distinctive quality of the Muslim political appeal was reflected also in the rituals of noncooperation. In general, the Gandhians and the Khilafatists arranged complementary yet separate observances to reach their communities. Most Surti Muslims did not see Congress ceremonies as occasions for their participation, perhaps because such occasions were so charged with Hindu symbolism. As a result, when speakers at public meetings called out "Vande Mataram, " crowds responded with a resounding cry, but when the same speakers shouted "Allah-o-Akbar, " there was often little response.^[25] There were, however, specific observances designed to foster Muslim support. Foremost among these were the Khilafat Days that Gandhi himself called on several occasions before the formal inauguration of noncooperation. In October 1919, Gandhi urged all Muslims to observe a day of mourning on the 21st and "to fast and pray and suspend all business and close their shops . . . and hold monster meetings and pass resolutions of protest against the contemplated betrayal of Turkey."^[26] Hindus were to play a supporting role by observing a hartal, thus putting a "sacred seal on the Hindu-Muhammadan bond."^[27] In Surat, the Khilafatists stressed Islam-centered concerns in the ceremonies they held to commemorate the occasion. The primary focus of the day for Muslims was a meeting at the Khwaja Dana Saheb mosque. Thousands gathered to pray and to pass resolutions protesting British policy toward Turkey.^[28] The audience at a public meeting held later in the evening, by contrast, was predominantly Hindu.^[29] This first Khilafat Day thus involved two parallel but distinct dramatic performances, both of which demonstrated the unpopularity of British rule.

This first Khilafat Day met with a somewhat mixed popular response, but a second organized the following March proved an unqualified victory for noncooperators eager to gather Muslim support. Virtually all the shops in the city, with the exception of a few tea hotels and a few stores of Parsis, closed down for the day. Muslim horsecarriage drivers, who had not observed the Rowlatt Satyagraha, struck work. Muslims flooded various mosques in the city for afternoon prayers, where their leaders delivered sermons on the state of the Khilafat. A public meeting held in the evening was much more a joint affair than that associated with the first Khilafat Day, since many Muslim leaders gave speeches and many Muslims were in attendance. But Hindu and Muslim speakers appeared to be addressing different audiences in the crowd. The Gandhians present made a few initial comments on the Khilafat question and the need for Hindu-Muslim unity, then went on to discuss home rule and other more general Congress is-

sues. Muslim leaders, on the other hand, were far more passionate in their speeches and stuck more closely to the situation of the khalifa and the holy lands.^[30]

Receptions planned for national-level leaders varied considerably according to the religion of the visitor. Muslim figures were greeted by the Khilafat Committee and by other local Muslim leaders, Hindus by officers of the Congress and municipal councillors. When the Ali brothers stopped in Surat in February 1920, they were garlanded at the station by Khilafatists and by representatives of prominent Muslim business firms. They toured major Muslim localities, pausing often there to be garlanded by heads of various firms and neighborhood organizations. Though the brothers attended the opening of the local Swadeshi store and an intercommunity public meeting, other critical points in their tour were chosen in a clear effort to win Muslim support and to map out a sacred geography that was distinctly Islamic. The highlights of the visit were prayer meetings in the Chok Bazaar mosque and a trip to Rander, a small town close to Surat dominated by its Sunni Bohras.^[31] Hindu leaders visiting the city were escorted to completely different strategic locations, including the Municipality, the Swaraj ashram, and the banks of the holy river Tapi.

Muslims even organized their own prabhat feris (processions) separate from those of Hindus. Sometimes, they would gather at a small mosque in Gopipura, then proceed through the city singing songs with Islamic overtones, before finally ending at the Khwaja Dana Saheb mosque, one of the two most important Islamic shrines in Surat. In contrast to the processions of Hindus, which often assumed a lively character with loud music, drums, cymbals, and exuberant singing, the Muslim processions were marked quietly and with great solemnity. Black banners symbolizing mourning or perhaps a sense of millennial expectation were draped by Muslim shopkeepers along the procession route. Leaders of the community clearly felt that exuberance was inappropriate for Muslims, particularly when their religion was in danger.^[32]

The success of all these rhetorical and ritual efforts in organizing local Muslims was considerable. Thousands of Muslims of diverse backgrounds responded to the Khilafatists' appeals, attending Khilafat ceremonies, giving up foreign dress, and leaving government-funded Urdu schools for national ones. When noncooperators called for the boycott of provincial elections, only twenty-four of approximately fourteen hundred eligible Muslims voted.^[33] Muslim leaders raised thousands of rupees for the Smyrna Relief Fund, which financed the Ali brothers' campaign to bring pressure on the British Parliament.^[34] The Khilafatists successfully isolated the older notable leadership of the community. In 1920, both the Nawab of Surat and the Nawab of Bela con-

sidered running for the provincial council but backed out after realizing that such a step might lead to their social ostracism.^[35] Support for the cause was weak only among the Daudi Bohras, where the da'i, perhaps anxious to maintain his reputation for loyalty as he entered a series of critical legal cases, used his considerable influence to pressure community members to abstain from donating to Khilafat funds.^[36] When Hamdani turned his Bohra English school into a national school, 110 of 140 students withdrew.^[37] Bohra cloth merchants refused to sign a pledge that they would not sell foreign cloth.^[38] But among others who professed Islam, there was an active and fairly consistent backing for noncooperation up to 1922.

The parallel employment of a syncretic Hindu idiom and a scripturalist Islamic rhetoric clearly facilitated widening involvement in the civic arena of groups that had previously been shut out of municipal and national politics by the language of constitutionalism and progress. But this infusion of religious symbolism into public politics also produced a hardening of political identities along religious lines that ended up working against Gandhian purpose. Most obviously, the dual idiom excluded the Parsis, who before the war had made contributions to public life far beyond their small numbers. No doubt the Parsi community would have been difficult to organize for noncooperation in any case. Many Parsis either worked for the government or collected government pensions. The district's liquor shop contractors, who were severely hurt by the Gandhian movement for abstinence, were virtually all Parsis. And as the municipal franchise expanded, members of the community increasingly depended upon government nominations for representation in the council. To counteract such material inclinations, the noncooperators needed to develop a powerful appeal that would clearly bring Parsis within its fold. This both the Gandhians and Khilafatists failed to do. And once Parsis began to hold aloof from public meetings, processions, and hartals, anti-Parsi feeling began to grow in the city, only alienating the Parsis further. Fortunately, Surat—unlike Bombay—never experienced serious anti-Parsi rioting during this time, but the mood of mutual distrust was sufficient to preclude any significant association of the community with the congress cause.

The separateness of Muslim and Hindu symbolic expression within a single movement also produced serious psychic strains among the most active of participants. Even during the noncooperation's strongest moments, some tension existed between the two appeals. Muslim leaders, for instance, had to reconcile militant Islamic rhetoric with the Gandhian principle of ahimsa. Often, they were able to do so only with some awkwardness. During one speech in 1921, Sayyid Ahmed Edrus, addressing an audience of Muslims eager to take some more effective

action on behalf of the khalifa, suggested that Islam required them to be nonviolent in the present but seemingly held out the possibility that this could change in the future. According to one government account, he argued "that jihad was a vital principle of Islam, but it was only permissible under certain conditions and circumstances. At the present moment these conditions were wanting and hence their [the Muslims'] duty was to follow a peaceful, non-violent jihad on the lines of Mahatma Gandhi and in the light of the life of the Prophet. The Koran, he added, condemned all disturbances and he quoted a verse to that effect from the book. . .. He advised the local Mussalmans not to lose their heads and to keep absolutely calm at the present juncture."^[39] On another occasion, a Muslim teacher was less restrained when, after citing verses from the Quran, he reportedly argued that "if . . . anyone interfered with Islam, the Muhammadans would rather be massacred, massacred, massacred, than to forgo the Khilafat."^[40] The meeting's chairman made the teacher sit down, fearing that such language might lead the audience to abandon its calm demeanor and threaten the atmosphere of communal harmony.

Not surprisingly, the Khilafatists were also reluctant to participate in nationalist activities that might alienate Muslims. Ceremonies to commemorate Lokamanya Tilak, a Maharashtrian nationalist with a communalist reputation, were particularly uncomfortable. In 1921, when the local Congress observed the anniversary of the Lokamanya Tilak's death by organizing large processions to the Tapi for bathing, not a single Muslim leader took full part. Narmawala, Edrus, and one other Muslim did come as far as the city square but did not join the crowd in the climactic ceremonies at the riverside. Speakers at public meetings later in the day attempted to deflate the anti-Muslim image of Tilak, but this did little to assuage the serious worries of Muslim participants.^[41]

Within the framework of anticolonial agitations, Muslim leaders remained vigilant in guarding what they perceived to be the interests of their community. In January 1922, Muslim leaders of Surat protested the absence of any Muslim participants in a session of a Congress working committee that had met in the city.^[42] When a Hindu member of the noncooperating municipality moved a resolution in the council that the slaughter of cattle used for farming and for dairy purposes be banned, Khilafatists objected vehemently that this action would alienate their community and cause the breakdown of Hindu-Muslim unity.^[43] The Hindu representatives quickly withdrew their backing for the resolution.

Thus, the Khilafat movement, by calling for the support of Muslims as Muslims in a holy struggle against the British, had clearly strength-

ened the importance of Islamic identity in local politics. Much the same sort of process was occurring among the Hindus, where extensive recourse to devotional and ascetic symbolism also contributed to furthering community awareness. For a brief period of three years, 1919–22, the development of these parallel religious consciousnesses clearly served the purposes of a powerful congress movement. But the cause of khalifa collapsed after 1922 with the deposing of the sultan of Turkey by his own countrymen, leaving Muslim noncooperators stunned and Hindu noncooperators embittered at having supported a cause so alien to their own preoccupations. Little remained to tie the two communities together. Once "normal politics" were revived, religious identifications persisted in civic politics, presenting new constraints and opportunities for local politicians, whether sincere or unscrupulous. By the later 1920s, Hindus and Muslims increasingly turned against each other, often violently.

The Rise of Communal Politics

The reassertion of representative politics after 1923 allowed communal tensions, almost always submerged during the noncooperation years, to come to the surface. Once the centrality of the provincial council and the municipality in local public life were restored, elites in Surat associated themselves increasingly with interest groupings defined by religious affiliation. Competition between rival elites over jobs, municipal funds and projects, and political power—all conducted within the language of constitutionalism and minority rights—seriously intensified during the later 1920s, creating an atmosphere conducive to violent social conflict.

The development of explicitly communal electorates was particularly important in fostering community-based politics. In provincial campaigns, the voting population was divided into non-Muslim constituencies for the city and the district and a Muslim constituency embracing urban Surat and Ahmedabad. Separate electorates tended to ensure that no candidate in general wards would dare dissociate himself from Hindu causes and that Muslim candidates would be committed to the defense of specifically Muslim concerns. Muslim leaders, recognizing they could easily be branded lackeys of the Hindus if they joined the Congress ticket, held aloof from the Swarajya party. Once in the council, elected Muslims tended to align more with government than with nationalists and were able to win power far beyond their numbers. In the Bombay provincial legislature of 1924–26, two of the three ministers chosen by government were Muslims. These two, Ghulam Hussain Hidayatullah and Sir Ali Mohammed Khan Dehlavi (brother of the

Nawab of Bela), used their positions repeatedly to frustrate Congress objectives. This in turn led to resentments among Hindu legislators that increasingly assumed a communal tone.

As far as Surat was concerned, the most important policy adopted by the Bombay ministry was its decision to institute separate electorates at the municipal level. Before 1925, provincial government had always guaranteed Muslim representation on the council through the process of nomination, a process that allowed it to continue to select such natural leaders as Sayyid Ali Edrus and the Nawabs of Surat and Bela. The old gentry thus had had little need to reach out to the larger Muslim population of the city; within the council, they pursued a Muslim politics that largely reflected rather limited concerns (two exceptions being the very recent issues of the Muslim graveyards and the Kelapith mosque). Even as the franchise widened in Surat and as the proportion of nominations made by government was reduced, the old notables had not considered advocating separate electorates for Surat, perhaps realizing that such a step would necessitate a transformation in their methods of gaining access to council seats. The decision to create distinct Muslim and non-Muslim constituencies came to Surat largely from outside.

Once this policy was adopted, however, any opposition to it almost inevitably took on a communal character. Immediately after the decision to create separate electorates had been made, Dr. Dixit and Dr. Mehta, two of the city's most prominent noncooperators, sent a letter to the Bombay Chronicle objecting to the measure and to delays in setting up municipal elections. Their letter charged that a "Mahommedan Minister [Hidayatullah], fascinated by that nefarious system of communal representation, which has been condemned by all sides, in his enthusiasm to grant communal representation to the Mahommedan community of Surat, which it believed was not so anxious to get it as the Minister was to give it, is probably responsible for this disastrous delay and its consequential events."^[44] Dixit and Mehta may not have intended any slight to the community as a whole, but the tone of their objections and those of other Congress leaders clearly upset local Muslims, who saw in these complaints attempts to deprive them of their rights. Several weeks after the publication of Dixit's letter, H. N. Jamadar, a former Khilafatist, wrote a passionate response to the Chronicle. "It is painful to see," he argued, referring to the allocation of only eight municipal seats to Muslims, "that even this can not be tolerated by our Hindu neighbors. . .. Let me assure your correspondents that the Mussalmans were always anxious to get it [separate electorates] because of the fact that in the General Constituency they were always at the mercy of their Hindu brothers. I regret to see that your correspon-

dents who are the pillars of the Swarajists in Gujarat should have taken such a hostile attitude toward the Mussalmans." Jamadar argued that swaraj could come only if Hindus showed more tolerance: "I . . . ask your correspondents how they are going to achieve their final object without allowing their co-brothers to enjoy their full communal rights which they are gradually getting through such systems as the communal representations and the like."^[45] Dixit and Mehta apologized for the careless wording of their original letter but continued to insist that separate electorates were anathema to the cause of Hindu-Muslim cooperation.^[46]

Such claims and counterclaims became a regular part of civic politics during the 1920s. With the first municipal campaign under the new election law, the idiom of community concerns assumed new preeminence in the city. On the streets of the city, candidates began to champion the causes of their own communities with increased aggressiveness, knowing that such rhetoric won votes in electorates that coincided with religious groupings. Once in office, Muslim councillors repeatedly appealed to the principle of minority rights, raised fears of discrimination, and evoked the backwardness of their community in calling for greater allocations of political resources and power. Hindu councillors from the Congress party, on the other hand, tended to represent their own opinions as expressing the sentiments of an undifferentiated public or people, but they actually spoke only for Hindus since they were setting themselves against the Muslims' claims to justice. The language of both sides was steeped in the grammar of representative discourse, which allowed for contentions based on both public and communal grounds. As long as the key institutions of the civic polity—the provincial legislature and the municipal council—reinforced religious identification, much local conflict would continue to play itself out in terms of the politics of community. Through this process of defining their interests in terms sanctioned in public culture, one diverse, almost amorphous, group of people—the Hindus—acquired an identity as a majority community that effectively excluded all others from the exercise of power; another almost equally heterogeneous collection of residents—the Muslims—assumed the position of a minority community requiring the protection of government against threats posed by the process of democratization.^[47]

Politicians like Dixit and Jamadar no doubt made unintentional contributions to building a society divided along religious lines despite sincere advocacy of Hindu-Muslim unity. Other figures, however, had little commitment to communal harmony and felt little hesitation about stirring one community's feelings against the other. As politics in the city became increasingly organized around community concerns, and as

communal conflicts grew ugly in other areas of India, raising fears that similar developments might threaten Surat, such persons won more visibility.

Among Muslims, the elite temporarily displaced by Gandhian politics took the lead in defending their community against Hindus. As soon as noncooperation began to wane, members of the gentry began to reassert their claims to Muslim leadership by critiquing the Khilafatists for placing group concerns at risk in the effort to achieve communal harmony and for dissipating funds that had been collected at the height of the movement.^[48] Their effort to resume their leading position in the city often took an anti-Hindu character. During one meeting held in March 1923 under the leadership of Sir Ali Mahommed Khan Dehlavi, Sayyid Ali Edrus, and members of the Nawab of Surat and Nawab of Bela families, a host of resolutions were introduced condemning provocative acts against Muslims in a number of locations around the country and criticizing Arya Samaj efforts to convert Muslims to Hinduism through shuddhi campaigns. Narmawala, the Khilafatist, seeing that the meeting was taking a direction harmful to Hindu-Muslim unity, was able only at the last minute to introduce a resolution expressing pleasure at the settlement of communal disputes in several Indian cities.^[49] But once the cause of the khalifa had crumbled, leaders like Narmawala, Syed Ahmed Edrus, and Fejullahbhai Hamdani really had no powerful Muslim issue with which to mount a counterthrust and became increasingly ineffective figures. The gentry families assumed much of their older preeminence, but their authority was now based less on their loyalty and traditional status—the criteria of natural leadership—than on the assertive advocacy of Muslim interests.

Among Hindus, a similar but more dangerous process began to take shape. Hindu figures who had lost influence during the period of non-cooperation, particularly those drawn from the old Home Rule League, assumed new influence in the city by taking up overtly Hindu causes. Particularly prominent among them were M. M. Rayaji, Karsukhram Vora, and Kanaiyalal Desai, all men with high levels of education who had long been committed to creating a political order based upon the principles of representation and moral and material progress. Within that order, however, such individuals were becoming concerned that minority rights should not be confirmed at the expense of the power and influence of the majority. Vora assumed leadership of the local chapter of the Hindu Mahasabha, a national organization devoted to the pursuit of Hindu interests.^[50] Rayaji, once president of the local Khilafat committee, now became editor of a newspaper called the Hindu, where he called for expanded campaigns to reconvert Muslims to Hinduism,

criticized government for establishing communal electorates and favoring Muslims, lambasted Hindus for weakness in defending themselves against assaults on their dignity and power, and demanded that candidates for municipal election demonstrate what they had done for their community.^[51] The Hindu Mahasabhaites maintained a small but vocal presence in the city, never assuming great political power but placing constant pressure on other politicians to associate with Hindu concerns.

In 1927, the development of this increasingly communal politics in Surat came to a head in the first of a series of bloody Hindu-Muslim riots. The initial catalyst of the violence was the decision by the Mahasabha to organize several ceremonies in celebration of the tercentenary of the seventeenth-century warrior king Shivaji, who had carved out a kingdom in Maharashtra at the expense of Muslim states in North India and the Deccan. The key event in this celebration was to be a procession through the streets of the city held on the day fixed as Shivaji's birthday. The purpose of these observances, according to one sponsor of the festivities held in Bombay, was to commemorate a regional king who symbolized "the common heritage of the Hindus or the Aryan people of Bharat Varsha [i.e., India]"^[52] and thereby inspire pride within the Hindu community. No doubt the event was intended in part as a statement of cultural resistance to continued British rule. But Shivaji was certainly a strange figure to inspire adulation in Surat. He was remembered in local history as a plunderer of the city's merchants, while Muslims saw him as a Hindu who had undermined the stability of Mughal rule. Many deemed the attempt by Vora, Rayaji, and Desai to hold ceremonies in his honor as a deliberate affront to their community.^[53] This the Mahasabhaites denied, arguing there was no anti-Muslim message to the celebrations, only a positive Hindu one. But they made little attempt to adapt their observance to Muslim concerns.

The procession held on the tercentenary morning was not very large, roughly one thousand persons. But it made up for what it lacked in numbers with sheer noise and fanfare. Five different bhajan groups played loud music to accompany the singing of Hindu religious songs by the whole crowd. Hundreds waved pictures of Shivaji and Hindu flags. As the procession approached the market of Burhanpuri Bhagal, Muslims became concerned that the noise would continue unabated in front of two mosques in the neighborhood. A few went up to the Hindu leaders in order to ask them to discontinue the music while passing by the mosques. Dr. Rayaji, intent that his community not show any sign of weakness, refused. At this point, people on the balconies of the two mosques immediately began to shower the procession with brickbats and pieces of metal, while others attacked the crowd directly

with clubs. The police rushed to a confused and already somewhat bloody scene unprepared for action. Without securing a firm promise from Rayaji that the music would cease, they decided to accompany the procession past the mosques. This brought a further hail of stones that injured twenty-two constables and eighteen participants in the celebrations. The police fell back, only to be pursued by a group of infuriated Muslims. In a state of panic, the police opened fire, killing one Muslim and one Hindu and injuring three others. When the district magistrate finally arrived with reinforcements, he found two angry crowds of two thousand people apiece facing each other. Order was restored at the scene, but sporadic violence continued elsewhere in the city for the rest of the day.^[54]

While the riots reflected tensions that had been building in the city for several years, it was their aftermath that really hardened the lines between the two communities. Politicians who had never identified with communal organizations now clearly took sides. "Local Hindus without distinction of caste or creed," led by M. K. Dixit and M. M. Mehta, responded to Dr. Vora's call to honor the dead Hindu youth by participating in a gigantic funeral procession of nearly twenty thousand persons to the cremation grounds.^[55] A similar but smaller procession, attended by all the leading Muslims, was held for the Muslim victim.^[56] Dixit, Vora, Kanaiyalal Desai, and Champklal Ghia all agreed to serve on a committee to establish a memorial fund of 100,000 rupees for the Hindu victim; a similar fund was created among the Muslims under the chairmanship of Sheikh Ali Bakza.^[57] In each case, some of the city's leading advocates of Hindu-Muslim unity had confirmed in this moment of crisis that their primary loyalties lay with their coreligionists.

Many of the elite participants in the processions and in fund-raising efforts may have had no intention of creating further ill will. Indeed Dixit and Bhimbhai Naik (now a member of the legislative assembly) among the Hindus and Sheikh Ali Bakza and Hafizuddin Khan among the Muslims won praise from the district collector for their efforts to restore calm. In their consultations with district officials, however, they acted primarily as negotiators for their respective communities; indeed, they had little choice but to do so if they wished to be consulted since the collector had chosen them precisely because he regarded them as representatives of their groupings.^[58] Only a few of the staunchest Gandhians, most notably Dayalji Desai, adopted a neutral peacekeeping role. But to a great extent, the neutral ground in the formal process of making peace was occupied by the district authorities, while indigenous leaderships found themselves thrust into roles either as Hindu or Muslim leaders. This was certainly one reason why resolving the problem became so difficult.

Among underclasses of the city, the riots had also fostered feelings of mutual distrust and hostility. Muslims were angered that only Muslims were ever brought to trial for the events of the Shivaji tercentenary and that Hindu leaders like Rayaji had gone unpunished for deliberate affronts. Hindus bristled at the fact that unarmed members of their community had been attacked and that the procession had never been allowed to go on to its end. A number of caste panchayats ordered the boycott of the shops and services of Muslims, threatening to fine members up to 11 rupees for each violation. Hindu wedding processions, which had traditionally relied on Muslim bands for their music, now went musicless, often leaving the band members with no means of earning their livelihoods.^[59]

Until September, there was little threat of renewed violence. But supporters of the Hindu Mahasabha then began to plan new celebrations, this time in honor of the elephant-headed deity Ganapati, that would again involve noisy processions with music passing by mosques. The plans again appeared to be deliberately provocative. While Hindu residents revered Ganapati, ceremonies in his honor had generally been small-scale affairs conducted either privately in homes or by small neighborhood groups. Processions to the river to immerse the images of Ganapati had never before assumed a public, city-wide character.^[60] The Mahasabha's leaders, however, now hoped to transform the occasion of the Ganapati observances into a major statement of Hindu pride and defiance (both of local authorities and of the Muslims). Muslims feared the celebrations, because of the possibility that music might again be played in front of the mosques and because of the tradition of anti-Muslim expression associated with the Ganapati celebrations in Maharashtra. Rumors spread that the Mahasabha was planning to import several hundred Maratha toughs into Surat for the festival.^[61]

The district administration, under heavy pressure from Muslims not to allow renewed insults to Islam, responded forcefully to these plans. In late August, several weeks before the Ganapati festival, the police issued orders banning the music of brass bands and drums in processions without special permit, allowing only five cymbals and no other instruments to be played within twenty paces on each side of a mosque, prohibiting playing any music in front of the mosque door, and requiring that processions pass by mosques without stopping. Deeming these orders insults to Hinduism, the Mahasabha called for a general hartal in the city on the day of the observances and resolved not to take the images of Ganapati to the riverside for immersion as long as the restrictions remained. They also organized huge public meetings—one with an estimated twelve thousand participants—to draft petitions of complaint to the district magistrate and to the Bombay government. The

resolution of a meeting of Hindu women, headed by the wives of most of the city's public leaders, argued that "this public meeting of the Hindu ladies of Surat enters their protest against the notification respecting the Ganpati festival . . . in disregard of the long established custom and elementary right of Bhajan Mandalis [religious processions] in Surat to go along public roads with the accompaniment of music and declares that the notification had deeply wounded the religious feelings of Hindu ladies." The women requested the governor of Bombay to "cancel this order and direct the local authorities not to interfere in future with such established customs and established rights of the people."^[62] A petition from another Hindu public meeting suggested that "it seems but reasonable to expect tolerance by one class of citizens for the customs of another class and no Government can tolerate with equilibrium the oppression of the one class at the hands of the other when the former are bonafide exercising their common-law rights enjoyed by them since time immemorial, much less would our benign British Government take any action which would jeopardize such rights."^[63]

Muslims put forward their claims in a similar language, appealing to the sanctity of traditional practice and of community rights, both notions enshrined in colonial discourses about India.^[64] In essence both sides confirmed through their rhetoric and actions that consideration of religious sentiment, now defined largely in oppositional terms, should be the chief criterion of political justice and that the maintenance of communal pride and self-worth should be the central preoccupation of their politics. Less consciously, both sides confirmed that a third party—the "benign British government"—was responsible for settling intercommunity disputes. Thus, as Hindus and Muslims became increasingly hostile to each other, they reinforced the dominance of colonial understandings of India and indeed of colonial power.

District and provincial authorities, recognizing the potential for explosion, refused to relax the restrictions on processions in Surat. For nearly one year, they waited for Hindus and Muslims to arrive at some compromise. Though some Hindus secretly immersed images of Ganapati in their private wells, most kept their images ready for some grander ceremony. Muslims remained vigilant about offenses to their religion, sustaining a steady pressure on the collector not to rescind his orders. In March, the ceremony of Holi went by without any processions. Meanwhile, the Hindu and Muslim press took up the causes of their communities with increasing vehemence and insensitivity. Finally, the next September, the Hindu rank and file took matters in their own hands and took Ganapati processions out in small groups to the river-

side over a period of several days. Violence far worse than that of the previous May erupted, leaving six dead and ninety-three injured.^[65]

With this second round of rioting, the lines were drawn even more sharply than before. Civic leaders like Dixit and Naik, concerned with alienating their Hindu constituencies, drifted closer and closer to the Mahasabha. Muslim politicians correspondingly moved toward the defense of Muslim sentiment. Thus, boundaries that had been drawn during the Khilafat movement were reinforced, hardened, and turned in an antagonistic direction.

The noncooperation movement would not be the last attempt by the Congress to create Hindu-Muslim harmony, but it would be the most successful. When Congress politicians later spoke of representing the people, the public, or the nation, few Muslims considered themselves included because most of those figures had chosen to side with the Hindu community at the critical moment. Necessary to their own survival, most Muslims came to believe, were distinct Muslim organizations and a distinct Muslim political idiom. Even those few who aligned with nationalism in the years before 1947 took great care to maintain a symbolic separateness from their allies.

By 1928 Surti society much more closely approximated colonial renderings of an India torn by irreconcilable religious divisions than ever before. The Gandhian dream of a social order where communities fully respected each other's beliefs now lay in shambles. Moreover, once Hindus and Muslims came to blame each other for their feelings of powerlessness and exclusion, the full dismantling of colonial institutions and values that Gandhi had envisioned in Hind Swaraj became increasingly unlikely. Religious conflict directed attention away from consideration of the sort of polity that Surat should have; it confirmed principles of community rights and interests inherent in the language of civic politics. Once communalism began to intensify in Surat, local politicians tended to focus increasingly on securing the greatest possible material and psychic benefits for their own community within the given civil order rather than on questioning, as Gandhi had proposed, whether that order was legitimate.

The British rulers of Surat did not directly create communalism; the production and reproduction of communal sentiment were largely a product of elite conflicts. But Surti politicians worked within a structure of colonial domination that created great constraints on culture construction, even at moments of resistance. Implicitly recognizing that only certain kinds of rhetoric could influence the process of decision making in a polity based upon representative principle, many elite figures put their claims to justice in religious terms. Gandhi's follow-

ers, too, reinforced the social categories of colonial discourse, even as they attempted to dismantle the myths of British civilization and Indian inferiority.

This is not to say that Hinduism and Islam were as alien to the Surtis as the principles of public and national politics. Indeed, religion had resonances for elites and underclass alike that gave it power never possessed by the language of constitutional justice. But it was by no means inevitable that religion would emerge as the focus of political conflict within the civic arena. It would have been especially hard to predict before the war—let alone before the beginning of British rule—that Muslims in the city, with their own internal diversity, would rally around the cause of a faraway khalifa or that the seventeenth-century raider of Surat, Shivaji, and the elephant-headed figure Ganapati would emerge as the chief symbols of Hindu unity and self-worth in the locality. The Anglo-Indian political order privileged and reinforced rhetorical efforts to develop appeals built around religious solidarity while discouraging attempts to create alternative languages that could challenge the assumptions of colonialism. Local leaderships who pursued their goals within the idiom of communalism often sustained and strengthened their political positions, while those few who fought the general pattern and tried to create some neutral ground became isolated figures without influence. Thus, through everyday political struggles in the institutions of colonial Surat, communally based understandings of the city became received as commonsensical ones, creating the illusion that local society had always been divided sharply along the lines of religion. It was largely as members of communally based collectivities that most Surtis became participants in the public domain.

Conclusion

The innovative contributions of Surti politicians to the language of communal politics are more self-evident than they are in the public discourse discussed in the previous chapter. The vocabulary of Hindu assertion and Muslim defensiveness that emerged in Surat was hardly predetermined by colonial sociological thinking; the politics of religious community no doubt left greater scope for originality in the form of metaphors, myths, and scriptural injunctions than the more derivative constitutional idiom. But the appropriation of public rhetoric and the development of communal appeals were actually related aspects of the same processes: the struggle of local elite figures to fight for justice and to achieve political efficacy within the structure of a liberal political system. In accepting the institutions of local self-government and the civic arena as the loci of their political actions, Surti politicians implicitly

agreed to fight their battles with reference to representative conceptions of politics. The idioms of public opinion and of community rights were both conditioned by colonial understandings that assumed power was to be exercised by representative men whose political role was to advance or guard the interests of their constituencies. Some local figures forged identities as leaders of the people and the nation. Others, feeling excluded from these categories, generated self-images as leaders of religious groups defending their communities' civil rights. Both sets of actors, in applying these models of action to local politics, effectively undermined the consolidation of the more thoroughly counterhegemonic culture proposed by Gandhi; both, too, banished the urban underclasses from an effective voice in shaping the political world that would succeed British rule.

It may seem odd to stop at 1928 in a study of South Asian politics, particularly one that purports to describe forces that were at work in the making of India's postindependence democracy. But in a sense the most decisive period of local politics had already passed. For much of the remainder of the colonial era, politics in Surat continued to work largely within rhetorical and ritual paradigms that had already been established by the late 1920s. By 1928 the principles of modernity and of representative government had become incorporated into the dominant language of politics in the civic domain; the linear view of history had won acceptance by local elites as their chief means for understanding political development. And it was impossible for any local politician to ignore the communal allegiances that divided civic politics.

The civil disobedience movement of 1930–34 would of course mark a new resurgence in popular participation in civic politics and of Gandhian cultural meanings. But in many ways civil disobedience was a fundamentally weaker challenge to the colonial hegemony than noncooperation had been. In Surat, local leaderships would never again press the Gandhian vision to the extremes of the early 1920s. The Congress itself had changed. Figures like Dayalji, Kalyanji, and Kunvarji, men who viewed themselves as the Mahatma's disciples and who had never been swayed by the agenda of progress and liberal representation, were marginalized. Ironically, the Congress leadership was assumed in the 1930s by Kanaiyalal Desai, the home ruler who had objected to noncooperation's attempts to attack the institutions of provincial self-government and of colonial primary education, a man who had sided with the Hindu community during the time of the riots. Ultimately, civil disobedience too ran its course, to be overwhelmed by politics managed by men committed to constitutionalism and urban progress. Gandhian principles, which posed a threat to the assumptions of public discourse, became peripheral in the city's politics. More precisely, as

Partha Chatterjee has put it, "Gandhism, originally a product of an anarchist philosophy of resistance to state oppression, itself becomes a participant in its imbrication with a nationalist state ideology."^[66] To a great extent, a negotiated version of colonial hegemony had become the new hegemony. While this hegemony would of course be continuously renegotiated over time, the most critical formative period in the making of the city's public culture had already passed.