The Muslims

Riveted by Mr. Ghosh’s honest and forthright one-sidedness, I didn’t immediately register the arrival of a newcomer. He was hard to miss, though, an imposing presence in the crowded room. He was the elected chairman of Panipur Union, Altaf-uddin, the very man to whom Mr. Ghosh had referred a little earlier. He wore a long white beard, the long white shirt and lungi, or ankle-length skirt, favored by Muslim men, and an Islamic cap. Our guide to this village had scheduled us to interview him first, at his home. I had, it seemed, upset social protocol by dropping in before that to see Basantibala. Word spreads quickly in a village, and when he had heard we were there, talking in the Majumdar house, Altaf-uddin had determined to right the situation by bringing himself to us.

He also brought a marked change to the tone of the discussion. Once Altaf was settled, I turned back to Mr. Ghosh and asked him what his reactions had been to the battle. There had been a decided shift in Mr. Ghosh’s sails:

We had no adverse reaction.

Why not?

[With a sideways glance at Altaf:] Because there were influential elders in this area. So whenever there were tensions among us, they would intervene. So we lived as brothers.

Altaf, as influential elder, promptly agreed:

There were some small incidents [before the riot], but they were smoothed over quickly.…Once an incident began, all the Hindus would take the side of the Hindus and all the Muslims would take the side of the Muslims. The influential people, both Muslims and Hindus, would come forward to solve the problem.

I already knew that Hindus talked differently in the presence of Muslims, and the tension in this case was tangible. So I eased Mr. Ghosh off the hook, turning to Altaf and asking for his version of the story.

I got the news at night that there was a little conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and that the Hindus were already out organizing a riot for the next day. The reason was that a cow ate the lentils in one field. A Muslim’s cow ate the kheshari in a field of a Hindu. It was a very petty thing. For that, they had some chase and counter-chase in the late afternoon. A little fighting, too. Now the Hindus were out with their horses to inform the other Hindus to come next day, to riot.

Where before Muslims plotted in the bazar, now Hindus rode the countryside mobilizing warriors. If Mr. Ghosh spoke for caste Hindus, I thought, Altaf-uddin was about to give me the version of the Muslims.

Muslims in Bengal

Islam became a factor in the life of the subcontinent very early: Arab traders journeyed there within a few years of the death of Muhammad in 632. However, the Muslim community in India traces its roots to Moghul conquests much later, in the twelfth century. The first sultanate in India was established in Bengal, at Gaur in the district of Malda, in the early thirteenth century, and Moghul rule was consolidated elsewhere in the subcontinent only four hundred years later.^[8]

The earliest Bengali Muslims were immigrants from central Asia, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabia, and northern India,^[9] but only a tiny minority of the subcontinent’s Muslim population today can trace their ancestry to immigration. Most are converts.^[*] Until the British government’s first census of the area in 1872, Bengal was considered to be a Hindu domain. What that census revealed shocked both rulers and indigenous elites: Muslims constituted very close to half the population, and in some areas they were an imposing majority.^[10] Their distribution was uneven: some western districts, including those that had housed the earliest Muslim administrations, showed them in the minority. But in the east, around Dhaka, the capital of Moghul Bengal from 1612 on, Muslims constituted 60 percent of the population.^[11]

Within that community there were vast distinctions. If the gulf separating high- from low-caste Hindus was enormous, that between upper- and lower-class Muslims was in some respects even greater. Class tended to coincide with origins. Upper-class Muslims traced their heritage to immigrants and claimed membership in a group called the ashraf. Converts, or the atrap, were drawn from the most oppressed among the population. While they were theoretically united by common worship and a theology lacking the sorts of rigid distinctions Hindus suffered through caste, ashraf and atrap Muslims were nonetheless severely alienated by culture and language. The ashraf prided themselves on their knowledge and use of Urdu, the language of the Moghul court at Delhi, which is spoken widely by Muslims in the northwestern parts of the subcontinent. To the ashraf in Bengal, Bengali was a crude and unworthy tongue. They especially disdained the dialects most common among the rural masses. Upper-class names, such as Syed and Shaikh, were similar to those current in Arabia and Persia. In fact, not all people with these names could claim direct descent from Arabian or Persian immigrants; high-caste Hindus who converted tended to be awarded these honorifics. People with Bengalified names, such as Mandal, Pramanik, Sarkar, were common among the peasantry and were held in contempt.^[12] So, too, were those Muslims who practiced despised occupations—weavers, shoemakers, barbers, and the like—all of whom, had they been Hindus, would have been Untouchables.

Between those who made clear claim to the distinction of ashraf and those who were atrap was a very small rural gentry. Although they occupied somewhat the same economic position as the Hindu bhadralok, and although they contributed some superb and beloved literary figures, they asserted far less cultural influence, for their numbers were minute. In the 1881 census, for example, only 0.92 percent of Bengali Muslim workers were listed as professionals, in contrast to 2.09 percent of Hindus. The commercial classes included only 2.55 percent of Muslims, 4.76 percent of Hindus. Fully 90 percent of Muslims were agricultural workers or laborers, compared to 76 percent of Hindus.^[13] But according to Rafiuddin Ahmed, a historian of Bengali Muslims, “numbers alone do not explain the insignificant role played by the middle income group and…their failure to act as a ‘link.’ ” The entire consciousness of these people yearned for acceptance by the ashraf. Among Hindus, the bhadralok may have shared with their Islamic counterpart a hearty contempt for manual labor. But they could speak with other Hindus, however low-class, in Bengali, a language to which they were all loyal and that was embedded in a mutually understood cultural history. Many socially ambitious Bengali Muslims, however, revered a culture from another land, using a language wholly unknown to their lower-class neighbors. As Ahmed put it, “No effective leadership could be expected from a group striving hard to adopt a class culture totally alien to the common man.”^[14]

Sitting in Basantibala’s front room, however, Altaf-uddin seemed distinctly non-alien, a thoroughly Bengalicized version of Muslim gentry. Here he was, ensconced in powerful but friendly stature amid the beds and clothing of his Hindu neighbors. The scene before me could stand as a metaphor for Hindu-Muslim relations in the modern period: culturally both similar and different, socially both friendly and distant, historically both joined and antagonistic.

[*] Some Bangladeshis oppose conversion theories, arguing instead for the more prestigious notion of immigration. Tamizuddin Khan, a founding father of Pakistan, wrote in his memoirs: “But immediate conversion does not seem to be a full explanation for the preponderance of Muslims in Bengal, where the caste system was far less rigorous than in South India, which saw no large scale conversions. There is reason to believe that in Bengal an additional cause for such a large concentration of Muslims was the fact that millions of Muslim[s of the] disintegrated Moghul Empire and of the innumerable provincial satraps and chieftains settled in the fertile soil of Bengal and most of them took to the cultivation of the land” (The Test of Time[1989], p. 51).

Culture and Community

When the British conquered India, the Muslim upper classes turned their backs pridefully on English education. Hindus, by contrast, and especially Bengalis, embraced it. Education was the entryway to middle-class life, and education in English, the language of the state, was most important. Before long, therefore, Muslims found themselves excluded from new arenas in which economic power was to be found within colonial power relations.^[15] This principled refusal to accept positions as agents of foreign rule further increased the class divide within the Islamic community. By the close of the nineteenth century, Muslims in Bengal accounted for half of the population, but only for 29 percent of those in schools. Among college students the picture was even more polarized: 93.9 percent were Hindus, only 5.4 percent Muslims.^[16]

At the same time that the Muslim middle class turned away from British education, they sought to distinguish themselves culturally from their Hindu neighbors. “What is it that makes you as a Muslim different from Hindus?” I asked a religious man. He replied, in English:

Religious performances are quite different. We go to the mosque, wearing caps, saying prayers there. They go to the puja [ritual celebration] in the Kalibari [temple of the goddess Kali], beating the drums, et cetera, et cetera.

There are people who are very conservative in both communities.…In general, either a Muslim or a Hindu, they strictly follow the rules, the instructions of the religion, [which makes] differences come up. A Hindu makes water standing, and a Muslim just, what should I say…The Hindu is not wearing [a] cap, the Muslim is wearing a cap. Just see it, that I am wearing a cap.

Nowadays there is some slackness in the customs. I cannot find a Muslim or a Hindu out by what they wear. Now they are all alike. They are not wearing beards now. They are not wearing caps.

This man moved quickly from a consideration of religious ritual to very personal habits such as urination. With great seriousness he bemoaned the inclination of youth to blur distinctions of attire. At the turn of the century, those very distinctions had been adopted with great deliberateness by his forefathers:

Ibn Maazuddin Ahmad…[in 1914] found his Muslim identity totally incompatible with local symbols, dress, and language. He…dismissed dhoti and chadar [a shawl] as explicitly Hindu. To him a Muslim attired in dhoti-chadar was as distasteful as the Sanskritized Bengali of the Hindus. Ironically enough, his own [writing] style was highly Sanskritic whenever he was not watching himself.^[17]

Rafiuddin Ahmed writes that the change away from such “everyday Bengali wear” happened over a period of two decades. Seventy-five years later, it was still effective. Muslim men quite universally wore lungis, and friends noted in casual commentary that the choice of attire was deliberate and politically motivated. Yet although Muslim men may not wear dhoti, Hindu men—all the men in Basantibala’s front room, for instance—do wear lungi for working or lounging. Sartorial differentiation, while significant, is not absolute.

Often people commented on the importance of being able to tell the affiliation of a stranger. “My identity as a Muslim was quite visible,” Altaf told us. “I wore this long kurta [knee-length shirt] and toupee [cap] and beard.” But identification is often not so easy. “I cannot find a Muslim or a Hindu out by what they wear,” as the religious man quoted above complained.

Among women, too, distinctions are common but not universal. Some Muslim women observe purdah, wearing the characteristic robes and face masks in public. The veil is limited to Muslim women, so its presence is a clear statement. Its absence, however, is not; many Muslim Bengali women move freely outdoors dressed in sarees. Similarly, a vermilion mark in the part of a woman’s hair tells you definitively she is Hindu, but since only married women wear it, its absence does not prove a woman is not Hindu. And some modern married Hindu women eschew the vermilion mark, so its absence is no longer even a conclusive sign of marital status among Hindus. East Bengali women of both communities are likely to wear costumes common among Pakistani women, or women in the western regions of India, where the Moghul Empire was centered in its later years. Kurta, salwar, and kameez, a loose-fitting tunic, baggy pants, and flowing scarf, are common both in the countryside and among modern city women.

Although in theory costumes identify religious affiliation, in fact dress is often influenced by class and function as well. Peasant women, for instance, often wear sarees without blouses, but Basantibala would not present herself to us blouseless, for it is improper to her station. Some among the younger women working in the Majumdar inner courtyard, however, wore no blouse, for comfort while doing domestic work in hot weather.

Many details of daily life are more alike across community lines than different. All Bengalis’ diet relies on rice, fish, and lentils; preparations may vary slightly, but often don’t. But Hindu and Muslim women concoct distinctly different sweets, and they revel in those differences and respect each other’s contributions. It is hard to distinguish a Muslim cultivator’s homestead from a Hindu’s, except by specifically religious signifiers such as altars. Relationships among both Muslim and Hindu family members are characterized by norms of generational and gender hierarchy, with decision-making dominated by elders and with men clearly ascendant.

Yet on the gender front important differences derive from religious practice, too. Islamic polygamy (now limited to two wives per Muslim man) combines with ease of divorce to disadvantage women decidedly. Muslim women, more influenced by rules of purdah to begin with (although many do not observe it, and some Hindu women, especially upper-class ones, are effectively confined to the home by tradition as well), are vulnerable to abuses from which Hindu women have greater (albeit not adequate) social protection.

People tend to socialize within religious boundaries. Everyone had stories of inter-religious friendships, yet such relationships were noteworthy as exceptions. Neighborhoods are organized by community. When a Muslim family moved into a Hindu neighborhood recently, their arrival was heartily resented. “They are so loud,” said the Hindu woman next door. “They quarrel and yell at each other, so we get no peace.” It is a stereotype that Muslims are more combative at home, one that would not stand up to detailed investigation, but this woman drew on it to express her social discomfort over her new neighbors’ proximity.

Underlying overt cultures and religious practices are personal habits that give people a meaningful sense of distinction, such practices as standing versus squatting to urinate. Hindus bathe midday before their major meal, Muslims may bathe any time it is convenient. While all Bengalis share many cultural attributes, these matters of personal habit are very influential. They cause people to “feel” their identities on a noncognitive level, and when people have contact within the other community it is often these details on which they comment most profoundly.

Nationalism and Partition

Through all such details of differentiation there nonetheless was created by British rule a strong impetus for unity. The two themes, of shared and competing interests, run richly through the experience of nationalist protest. It is perhaps a popular Western misconception of European colonialism in India that its rule went unchallenged for two hundred years. In fact, direct rule was established only after a serious rebellion in 1857 of Indian troops against the British army in which they were employed. The Indian National Congress, parent organization to resistance against imperial domination, was founded in 1885, and from the beginning of the twentieth century the British were faced with militant opposition.

At first, the Congress remained politely upper-class. In Bengal, though, other, more militant forces were brewing, especially in the eastern parts of the province. In 1905 Lord Curzon, then governor-general of India, partitioned Bengal into two provinces. Overtly, his reasoning was administrative; the existing united province included an enormous area, part of it non–Bengali-speaking. But in fact the motivation was political. “Bengal united is a power,” wrote the home secretary. “Bengal divided will pull several different ways…one of our main objects is to split up and thereby to weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule.”^[18]

When the division came, it reflected the lines of religious community. East Bengal was formed of Muslim-majority districts, combined with Assam and Burma; West Bengal contained the Hindu-majority areas, with Orissa and other Hindi-speaking regions. The eastern districts were especially mistrusted, “a hotbed of the purely Bengali movement, unfriendly if not seditious in character and dominating the whole tone of Bengal administration.”^[19]

Partition evoked the first mass-based revolt. Called the Swadeshi (or Homeland) movement, it used the tactic of boycotting everything British: goods, education, offices, courts. Most students and officeholders, however, were Hindus, since the Muslims had eschewed British-tainted institutions from the start. But in East Bengal many merchants were Muslims. To refuse to purchase, indeed often to burn, British-made goods economically disadvantaged those shopkeepers. Muslims, moreover, appreciated Partition, because it gave them far greater access to power in East Bengal than they had had in Hindu-dominated united Bengal. It was a fact not lost upon subsequent historians that the first massive uprising against the British contained within it such powerful elements of hostility between Muslims and Hindus. “Divide and rule” could not have been more blatant. The British revoked Partition in 1911, but they had succeeded in heightening bitter rivalry between the communities.

Paradoxically, the first national campaign to challenge British rule was built on the cornerstone of Hindu-Muslim unity. The Congress was largely a Hindu organization, because at first it excluded all who were not English-educated and sought merely to negotiate more respect and privileges from the foreign rulers. With the introduction of Gandhi to leadership in the early 1910s, however, the Congress determined to move into the public domain. Gandhi set about building a controversial alliance with an Islamic movement called Khilafat. An international campaign was under way to restore the caliph, head of the Muslim world, to power in the aftermath of the destruction of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, and Khilafat was its Indian arm, led by two dynamic brothers named Ali.^[20]

Despite this auspicious early alliance, relations between Hindu and Muslim nationalists grew increasingly stormy. The Congress movement had notable Muslim leaders—Abul Kalam Azad, for instance, who was president of the organization during the final negotiations with the British—but many Muslims resented and resisted the Congress and eventually organized an independent movement under the aegis of the Muslim League. Although the League’s agenda was the protection of Muslims’ rights during the process of dismantling the Empire, only late in the struggle, in 1940, was the demand raised for a separate Muslim state.

It succeeded. Seven years later, when the British quit India, Pakistan was formed from the western and eastern Muslim-majority areas of the subcontinent, the two wings separated by fifteen hundred miles of India. East Bengal became East Pakistan.^[*] Born in an explosion of communal bloodshed and bitterness, both wings of Pakistan were soon faced with the necessity of replacing the educated Hindus, who fled to India in great numbers. In Bengal, changes had been afoot throughout the twentieth century. The founding of Islamic schools was an important theme in Muslim nationalism. More and more Muslims were becoming educated. Responding to nationalist movements and negotiations, the British had granted, piece by piece, some elements of representational government. But still, newly independent Pakistan, especially East Bengal, had to rely on a grossly insufficient pool of Muslims trained for administrative or professional service. Those few who were educated passed into the period of Independence with distinct advantage.

[*] For the East Bengalis, Pakistan was both a triumph and a tragedy. Bengal was one of two states cut in half by Partition, the west going to India, the east to Pakistan. Many miles of India separated East from West Pakistan, and no sooner were the flags raised than the troubles began. Bengalis were dominated and economically exploited by West Pakistan, where political power was concentrated. Finally, in 1971 the Bengalis revolted, aided by India, and succeeded in establishing the new state of Bangladesh.

Politics in Panipur

Altaf-uddin was one of the advantaged few, a local man whose father before him had been the elected chairman of the Union and who had himself succeeded to that position in the Pakistani period. In 1971, a quarter-century after Pakistan was formed, the Bengalis rebelled against exploitation and formed the independent nation of Bangladesh. Throughout these changes, Altaf remained in office. His position fell somewhere between that of county chairman and ward boss; his influence cannot adequately be described by the duties of his elected office. It was he who represented local wants to higher authority. He was the man on the spot with access to power, the liaison between ordinary folk and the distant and mysterious government. That relationship had remained constant through two generations and three eras—British, Pakistani, Bangladeshi—and through many changes of government. Altaf was a force to be reckoned with.

He lost no time in letting me know how central his role in the riot had been:

So at ten o’clock in the night, the Hindus came to me. First came the Hindus, then came the Muslims. I told both parties to stop thinking about rioting; “I’ll take whatever steps are necessary to prevent a riot.” But I was afraid that there might be a riot, in spite of my warning, because I knew that Hindus were already out recruiting other Hindus. So I informed the police station about this development, and asked them to send some forces to come here.

The police staff came to my house an hour before dawn. Then I took them to that locality.…I saw many people gathering already. Communal feelings had been aroused. Neither Hindus nor Muslims could be stopped.

No question about Altaf’s importance: both Hindus and Muslims called on him for help. Realizing, however, that he could not control the tempers of his people, he performed the prestigious task of calling in the police. They acknowledged his centrality by assembling first at his house and using him as their guide to the community. Altaf identified his role precisely: he was the connecting link between villagers and authorities.

He was also the only local player carrying a gun, a fact of symbolic significance in a number of later accounts, as well as his own:

I first went to the Hindus’ house. I had a gun with me. I asked them to hand over the cow to me. In the meantime, I asked the police officer to stay with the Muslims, to prevent them from doing anything suddenly.

Wait a minute: First I asked the policeman to go to the Hindus’ house while I stayed back with the Muslims. But the officer said, “No, I’ll stay with the Muslims, you go to the Hindus.”

It was not immediately clear to me why Altaf stopped himself to emphasize this seemingly trivial point. As he went on with his story, however, it seemed to me he was underscoring the courage he had needed to confront the rage of the opposing community. He was also suggesting once again that his position was that of nonpartisan leader of the entire community. Perhaps, too, he was letting me know that his presence at the Hindus’ compound was innocent, lest I suspect his complicity in what soon followed:

It was early in the morning, but there were already four or five hundred Muslims gathered. So I went to the Hindus, and they gave me the cows.

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. At that time, I was inside a Hindu house; I quickly left, afraid that they could harm me, too, because I am a Muslim.

I came to the Muslim side and yelled to the police officer, “Why couldn’t you stop them?” It had been his choice to stay back with the Muslims. After that I took the Muslims back to their side. Because there was a fire in the haystack, the Hindus couldn’t stay silent. They, too, started to come into the field with their weapons, dhal katra [weapons of war]. I was running from one side to the other.…

By ten o’clock in the morning, there were almost ten thousand people, altogether ten thousand on two sides. 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. My identity as a Muslim was quite visible. I wore this long kurta and toupee and beard. I was all along asking the Muslims to stop. But they wouldn’t listen to me.

Who started the fire in the haystack was a point of some controversy among subsequent informants. Altaf’s story placed responsibility on the Muslims’ side, but his fiercest blame was for the police officer. He had chosen to stay with the Muslims and yet had failed to control them. It is not clear whether Altaf meant to suggest complicity, or simple incompetence. Certainly he was telling me that he himself was not responsible, since the police officer had directed him to the Hindus. In any case, once the Muslims moved, the Hindus, in his version, had no choice but to retaliate.

With the fire Altaf retreated to the side of his co-religionists: “I quickly left, afraid that they [the Hindus] could harm me, too, because I am a Muslim.” Still, he continued to run from side to side, until the numbers grew so large he feared that his reputation could no longer protect him. Too many among the mob were strangers. All the symbols of his person—his beard, kurta, and cap—identified him as Muslim, not as chairman. His influence over the rioters was at an end.

What Altaf described here was a clear point of demarcation in the progress of the riot. Local authority had lost its meaning as the crowd grew to include people from other localities. No longer was the fight about particular issues; it had become engulfed in something else, something that drew on more universal passions. It had become a “communal riot.”