Abstract
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Decolonization in South Asia: Meanings of Freedom in Post-independence West Bengal, 1947–52, London, Routledge, 2009; 256 pp.; £90.00 hbk; ISBN 9780415481069
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s book sits at the crux of two important recent historiographical developments. On the one hand, scholars have taken bold approaches to the study of partition in South Asia. They attempt to ‘work through’ the historical events in new ways, to use Willem van Schendel’s term. Studying the political and economic ambiguities that continued to confound Indian and Pakistani borders after 1947, as well as the long-term social and cultural ‘echo effects’ of partition, as Vazira Zamindar puts it, provide ways to think in terms of historical processes instead of memorializations of trauma and loss alone. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s work contributes to this working-through of the partition history of Bengal.
Another related move in historiography emphasizes the periodized study of decolonization in South Asia. In the vein of this trajectory are collected editions by Prasenjit Duara and Dipesh Chakrabarty, and their colleagues, as well as Joya Chatterji’s foundational monograph on post-independence and post-partition West Bengal. Bandyopadhyay contributes an investigation into historical natality after 1947.
Bandyopadhyay, of course, does not claim that the short 1947–52 period of his study saw the birth of new, unprecedented, social and political relations. On the contrary, he suggests that the years between 1947 and 1952, stretching from partition to the first Lok Sabha elections, were an important cusp in the decolonization of India. Patterns of political representation and contestation during this five-year span both recalled the pre-independence decades and foreshadowed the post-Nehruvian era.
Bandyopadhyay is not concerned with the arrival of post-independence ‘freedom’ in any positivistic sense. His interest lies in the ‘meanings of freedom’, that is, in the uses of ‘freedom’ as a political symbol by diverse, vying social groups. ‘Freedom had different meanings for different people’, Bandyopadhyay notes in his introduction. This claim serves as a refrain in the subsequent six empirically rich chapters, largely focused on representative politics in Calcutta.
His first chapter considers the crises and shocks of governance that followed after partition. Mention is given to the food shortages of 1947, the outbreak of cholera and plague in 1948, and to the long-term imbalances in political economy as West Bengal, ‘received most of the industries of the previous province, but much less of the arable land’. Bandyopadhyay also logs mention of the refugee problem that spiked in 1947–8, and again in 1950–1, caused by ‘communal violence’.
In the second chapter, Bandyopadhyay provides a valuable overview of the different social groups that contested the meaning of ‘freedom’ in West Bengal in the 1947–52 period. He telegraphically describes forms of mobilization among workers, peasants and the middle class, and among communities of Muslims, bhadralok Hindus and Dalits. Bandyopadhyay identifies the years in question as a phase of militancy and radicalism across political groups, thus providing an interesting comparative frame to study ‘communal violence’, peasant unrest and communist mobilization. Bandyopadhyay’s historical account disrupts the liberal Eurocentric pairing of an ideal notion of civic freedom with an ideal vision of civil society. Instead, he describes the fraught tensions that arose in a nascent decolonizing ‘political society’, as Partha Chatterjee defines it.
The four main chapters of the book describe aspects of transformation in the political arena of West Bengal (in 1947–52). Congress leaders pursued programs of national integration using the radio waves, pedagogical texts on national history, as well as strategic participation in religious events, including Durga puja celebrations, and public lectures on the Qu’ran. Bandyopadhyay uses literary journals, newspaper articles, and campaign ephemera to describe electioneering practices, as well as the sarcastic and humorous responses they elicited amongst bhadralok audiences.
Sarat Bose attempted to consolidate a moderate regional West Bengali opposition to the Congress, in the form of the Socialist Republican Party and the Forward Bloc. Meanwhile, the Bengali Hindu conservatives continued to patronize the Hindu Mahasabha. Bandopadhyay depicts Calcutta’s communist leaders as situated between a national rock and an international hard place, unsure where to return, whether to Russia, or to China, or to Telegana. Bandyopadhyay imaginatively notes that the protests on the streets outside Presidency College during the suppression of the communists by Dr. B.C. Roy’s Congress government in 1949–50 served as a precedent for government responses to the Naxalites in the 1970s. In both cases, the coercive legal and martial methods of the British colonial administration provided the model, Bandyopadhyay suggests.
Caught within a circumference of opposition, the Congress simultaneously strove to be both ‘compact’ and ‘decentralized’. But while articulating values of socio-economic equity and the protection of minorities, the party was ineffectual in bringing about significant change on the ground. Strands of organized opposition emerged from within the Congress ranks itself, such as the formation of the Krishak Mazdoor Praja Party under J.B. Kripalani. The book concludes with a study of the ‘great adventure’ of the 1952 elections, as a tentative Nehruvian order began to coalesce despite fissiparous tendencies.
Overall, the reviewer sometimes wished for more bird’s-eye perspectives of the historical landscape and more sustained retrospective glances at the legacies that informed these years. The concept of ‘decolonization’ itself, as Prasenjit Duara points out, was rooted in processes dating back at least to 1919, if not to 1905. Furthermore, a discussion of the constitutional, legal and fiscal structures of decolonization, especially in terms of the changing relationships between region and nation, as addressed in Joya Chatterji’s work, would have helped contextualize the emphasis on regional politics. In a study of West Bengal, one also would have wished for a transnational perspective on events taking place in East Pakistan in the 1947–52 period in these seminal years under scrutiny. Most of all, a fuller discussion of political mobilization and disenfranchisement among West Bengali Muslims, who still constituted one quarter of the population, would have rounded out this study. Bandopadhyay’s use of the concept of ‘communal politics’ seemed to creat limitations to historical analysis that other scholars, such as Ayesha Jalal, have successfully interrogated.
The historiographic location of the book at the nexus between new partition studies and decolonization studies makes it important for researchers of South Asian history. The detailed content of each chapter, the astute observations about West Bengali politics, the clear exposition, and the attention to new kinds of sources, make this a valuable work for a wide readership.