Violence and Restraint

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

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

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

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

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

“Cool it out and ease the tension.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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