Partition in Bengal: Re-visiting the Caste Question,1946–47

Introduction

Identities, though embedded in long-standing social relations, are politically articulated in particular historical conjunctures, and therefore conjunctural shifts often result in the displacement of one identity and vocalization of another and consequent reconfiguration of identity politics. The historiography of Indian Partition usually situates this event within a historical context of conflict over space and identity between two religious communities, the Muslims, on the one hand, and the Hindus, on the other; the Sikhs add a further layer of complication to an otherwise simplified religious binary. All internal differentiations based on gender, caste or region are collapsed to present the two contending groups as homogenous subcontinental categories representing two distinct social and eventually political identities. If the gender imbalance in this historiography has now been rectified to some extent, ³ many other voices still remain silent. As Urvasi Butalia has reminded us: ‘In its almost exclusive focus on Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims, Partition history has worked to render many others invisible. One such history is that of the scheduled castes, or untouchables.’ ⁴

The disappearance of the Scheduled Castes (SCs) or the ‘untouchables’ of India, or Dalit (oppressed) as they prefer to call themselves, from the history of Partition is possibly due to two reasons. The first is their relative invisibility in the Partition archives: records of the colonial state, documents of the mainstream political parties, newspapers, even the rich Partition literature, rarely mention them as distinctly recognisable participants in the events of this period. And this invisibility possibly arises from another misperception—that since the organized Dalit, under the leadership of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, did not actively identify with Hindu nationalism or Congress politics and asserted instead their distinctive social and political identity in the late colonial period, they had no stake in Partition politics and consequently, they did not participate in or become targets of Partition-related violence, except by accident.

However, in recent years Butalia, Ravinder Kaur and Ramnarayan Rawat have made the Dalit visible in the history of Partition in north India. ⁵ For eastern India, the relative invisibility of the Dalit still persists, although we now have a rich literature on Partition in Bengal. Among the works on politics that led to Partition, Joya Chatterji’s Bengal Divided mentions the SCs as minor actors in the unfolding political drama that was dominated chiefly by the Hindu bhadralok (or the upper-caste elite). ⁶ Partha Chatterjee has argued that the Dalit had no role in this unfolding drama, as the decision to partition Bengal was made from the top and from New Delhi. ⁷ We also now have a number of important studies on the aftermath of Partition and the experiences of refugees displaced by Partition in Bengal, and some of them mention the migration and struggles of Dalit peasant refugees. ⁸ But none of these studies relate Partition to the social and political movements of the Dalit.

Yet, the role of the Dalit in Partition politics in Bengal is not totally an uncharted territory. Apart from Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s earlier works, ⁹ Dwaipayan Sen has recently addressed this question. ¹⁰ He focuses primarily on the role of Jogendra Nath Mandal, who in 1943 had started the Bengal branch of the All India Scheduled Castes Federation (AISCF), and blames Congress machinations for what happened to the Dalit in those final years of British rule. But while Congress was certainly no real friend of the Dalit, the politics of this period and Dalit involvement in it, as this essay will argue, had more complexities and more actors than we usually recognize. Anirban Bandyopadhyay in another recent essay has also critically looked at Dalit politics in Bengal in those crucial years of 1945–46. But he focuses more on Ambedkar’s election to the Constituent Assembly (CA) from the Bengal Legislative Assembly than on Partition politics as a whole. ¹¹

Ravinder Kaur, while studying the experiences of Partition refugees from Punjab, observed that the ‘untouchable groups were neither untouched by nor isolated from the Partition-related events’. ¹² And this issue of Partition, as Ishtiaq Ahmed has shown, had deeply divided the SC leadership in Punjab. ¹³ In Bengal, too, a similar situation prevailed, as Bandyopadhyay indicated in the second edition of his book, and in an earlier article in 2009. ¹⁴ In this essay we present fresh empirical evidence (collected in the course of our larger project on Dalit Partition refugees) to further develop his argument that the Dalit in Bengal did not remain untouched by or uninvolved in Partition politics and violence. As a result, the unity of their political movement was ruptured and they lost their political autonomy. They responded to the situation in diverse ways. One group of Dalit leaders, led by Mandal, were opposed to Partition and believed that a Dalit–Muslim alliance was in the best interest of the Dalit. But there was also another powerful group which got closer to Congress and Hindu nationalism and demanded a Partition of Bengal when it seemed imminent that the whole of Bengal might go to Pakistan. ¹⁵ And many Dalit peasants in Bengal were caught in this political vortex and became both victims and perpetrators of violence.

The reasons for this deep Dalit entanglement in Partition politics, this essay argues, are to be found in the political geography of Dalit movement in colonial Bengal. The social movements that began to assert Dalit identities in Bengal from the 1870s had two very clearly identifiable geographical locations and two communities were at the forefront of these movements. One was the Rajbansi community, which lived mainly in the North Bengal districts of Rangpur, Dinajpur, Jalpaiguri and the princely state of Cooch Behar. ¹⁶ The other community, the Namasudras, lived mainly in the eastern districts of Bakarganj, Faridpur, Jessore and Khulna, but were also scattered in other eastern and central Bengal districts. ¹⁷ When the Dalit political movement started in the early twentieth century, these two communities provided the majority of its leaders and its main rural support base. ¹⁸ For both these communities, their demographic concentration in closely defined geographical locations was a major factor behind successful social mobilization.

Space becomes important in the life history of a social-political movement in two important ways. First, as Edward Said observed, ‘space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us’. ¹⁹ These meanings emotionally construct collective identities and social linkages that lay behind many of these movements. Both Rajbansi and Namasudra identities were deeply embedded in their respective regions, the Rajbansis having old tribal ties with the land and a history of regional state formation in North Bengal, and the Namasudras emerging as a peasant community through land reclamations in the eastern Bengal districts since the late nineteenth century. Their identities were thus firmly rooted in the spaces they lived in. ²⁰ Second, as aforementioned, the fact of living in a contiguous space provided that crucial ability to mobilize for a social or political cause. Therefore, if we look at how the Radcliffe Line was drawn to divide Bengal, it would become clear why both the Rajbansis and the Namasudras were so deeply perturbed. The Rajbansi territory was divided down the middle, while the Namasudra habitation zone almost entirely went to Pakistan, only very few of them still remaining on the other side of the border in the central districts. This geographical disruption was bound to create anxieties and reconfigure their identity politics, as they began to align with the broader subcontinental politics in the hope of influencing the decision at the top, losing in the process the unity and autonomy of their socio-political movement. This essay draws attention to how the threatened disruption of political geography affected Dalit identity and politics in Bengal and jeopardized their political future.

Electoral Politics and the Political Divide

The Government of India Act, 1935 had secured the SC thirty reserved seats in the Bengal Legislative Assembly. In the election that followed in 1937, despite Congress mobilization and successes in other provinces, only five of these thirty seats were won by its candidates; two went to Hindu Sabha, while the rest (twenty-three) went to Independents. Two more SC candidates, one Congress and one non-Congress (Jogendra Nath Mandal), won in unreserved seats. ²¹ But these non-Congress representatives could not combine to develop a united Dalit political voice. Eventually, around 1942–43, three distinct groups emerged among these ‘Independents’: the Congress-nationalist Independents; the Bengal Scheduled Castes Party headed by Mukunda Behari Mullick; and the Bengal Scheduled Castes League led by Jogendra Nath Mandal. In early 1943, the nationalist group dissipated due to frustration with Congress indifference, ²² and many of them supported the Muslim League ministry led by Sir Nazimuddin. ²³ In May 1943, Mandal established the Bengal branch of the AISCF, which Ambedkar had founded the previous year. By 1945, the Dalit movement in Bengal was clearly divided into two main opposing groups. On one side was the AISCF under Mandal’s leadership, which by this time had opened branches in the districts of Bogra, Jessore, Tipperah, Rajshahi, Faridpur, Rangpur and Burdwan; Barisal had three branches; Mymensingh and Khulna had two each; one more branch was about to be opened in Dacca. ²⁴ In other words, except for Burdwan, its strength was mainly concentrated in eastern Bengal, where the Namasudras mainly lived. In North Bengal, it was aligned with the Kshatriya Samity of the Rajbansis. On the other side of the political spectrum was the All-India Depressed Classes League, affiliated to Congress, and led by the Congress MLA Radhanath Das (a leader of the Chamars). One of its vice presidents was the Namasudra leader P. R. Thakur. ²⁵ We do not have much information about the activities and strengths of the two contending organizations, except for a police report from October 1945, which mentions: ‘So far there has been very little or no overt local activity social or political on the part of both the organisations.’ ²⁶ However, they were galvanized into action as the election of 1946 approached.

In this election, the AISCF contested seven reserved and one unreserved (General) seats in Bengal and won in only one reserved seat by its president Jogendra Nath Mandal, who had lost in two other constituencies, one reserved and the other unreserved. Its ally, the Kshatriya Samity of the Rajbansis, contested five reserved seats and won in only one, which was uncontested. By contrast, Congress SC candidates won in twenty-four reserved seats (out of a total of thirty). Prasannadeb Raikat (Rajbansi) and P. R. Thakur (Namasudra) won the election as Independent candidates, ²⁷ but both later joined the Congress. The 1946 election results thus represented a complete reversal of the 1937 result, when among thirty-two elected SC candidates only seven belonged to Congress. In the Rajbansi-dominated Dinajpur, SC reserved constituency, Rup Narayan Roy, a Communist candidate, won, adding another interesting dimension to the 1946 election scenario.

But how should we read these election results? We should start with the first caveat that this election result did not adequately reflect the mind of the Dalit peasantry because, given the high property and educational qualifications, only about 10 per cent of the adult population had voting right. It is also true, as Ambedkar had pointed out, that the dual voting system imposed by the Poona Pact of September 1932 favoured the Congress candidates, as the caste Hindus were most likely to vote for them in a joint electorate. ²⁸ Echoing Ambedkar, Mandal too had claimed in a speech on 31 December 1946 that while Congress candidates received only 28 per cent of the SC votes, the non-Congress candidates received 72 per cent and still lost. ²⁹ While the claims of Ambedkar and Mandal about vote share were unmistakably correct, for Bengal that reading still leaves a few questions unanswered. It does not explain how under the same dual voting system in the 1937 election, non-Congress Independent candidates could win as many as twenty-three out of thirty reserved seats. The Congress political machine was as active in 1937 as it was in 1946. It also does not explain how Jogendra Nath Mandal could win his 1937 election from an unreserved General constituency in Barisal against an influential caste Hindu Congress candidate. Masayuki Usuda has shown that a broad-based cross-caste and cross-religious mobilization there had secured his victory. ³⁰ So the question we want to pose is, if such a broad social coalition was at all possible in 1937—despite the obvious asymmetrical power relations in Bengali Hindu society—why did it no longer work in 1946?

It is possible to argue that widespread corruption on the part of the colonial state and the caste Hindu election officials might have been instrumental to AISCF’s defeat. ³¹ It is also true that on 7 January 1946 the then Governor of Bengal, R. G. Casey, had almost exactly predicted the results of the forthcoming Assembly election. How could he know unless the government was involved in manipulating the results? However, if we read his whole letter, it would become clear that he was projecting these results on the basis of his analysis of the just-completed election to the Central Assembly, where he found that ‘the only two parties that count are the Congress and the Muslim League’. As the ‘nationalist’ or Congress Muslim candidates were marginalized, so were the non-Congress SCs. ³² There were undoubtedly some corrupt practices involved, as there was evidence of Congress trying to inflate the electoral rolls with caste Hindu underage voters. ³³ But it is not certain how widespread such malpractices were. And the available evidence also suggests that allegations of corruption were flying in both directions and they started long before the election. ³⁴ Congress also alleged that the Muslim League, being in the government, manipulated the electoral process by controlling the officials. ³⁵ Colonial records show that the government took these allegations seriously and took elaborate anti-corruption measures, including a new legislation Corrupt Practices and Election Enquiries Bill passed in January 1946. ³⁶ It does not mean that everything was squeaky clean. As Governor Burrows, who succeeded Casey, conceded to the Secretary of State: ‘I cannot say of course that in no case did any Government officer of any grade show any particularity.’ But whenever there was any specific allegation, he assured, it was investigated and in every case it was found to be without foundation. ³⁷ So it is difficult to establish from the archives that any large-scale manipulation of the election had taken place. This compels us to look for other reasons to explain what changed between 1937 and 1946 to cause such a complete reversal of the electoral fortunes of Mandal and his party.

The most crucial change that had happened was that the regional Dalit politics of Bengal had been sucked into the subcontinental politics of Partition. Mandal had joined the AISCF, and by doing so, he had proclaimed his separation from mainstream nationalism championed by the Congress; and more significantly, he had aligned with the Muslim League. He believed that the Dalit and Muslim peasants in East Bengal, both being minorities, had a shared past of oppression and deprivation, and so a Dalit–Muslim political alliance was in the best interests of the Dalit. But interestingly, his pro-Muslim League stance did not endear him to many of his fellow Dalit, who were intensely anxious about their future in a Muslim-majority province. His rival Independent candidate in the Pirojpur–Patuakhali constituency, the Namasudra leader Upendranath Edbar made a fervent appeal to his caste brothers that as evidence of their ‘unfaltering faith in Hindu dharma of their forebears’, they should not vote for Mandal. ³⁸ The upper-caste Hindu bhadralok were clearly panicking and seething in anger. The League in 1946 was fighting the election on the ‘Pakistan’ demand. The creation of Pakistan, League leader M. A. Jinnah had announced in an election meeting, was ‘the only choice and the only issue before us’; ³⁹ the election was presented as a referendum for Pakistan. ⁴⁰ Therefore, if Mandal’s caste was a factor, even more important was his support for the Muslim League. The Congress launched a vigorous emotional campaign focusing on this single issue. Surendra Mohan Ghosh, the Congress president, implored the voters of Barisal ‘to ponder and pause before casting their vote against Congress, whether they wanted disruption of India or Pakistan in Bengal or a United India with Bengal as an integral part’. ⁴¹ Congress, too, was looking for a mandate from this election, a mandate for independence for a united India. As Ambedkar himself noted, the main ‘issue over which the election was fought was independence and Quit India’ ⁴² —other issues mattered less. Therefore, in meeting after meeting Mandal and his group were derided as puppets of the Muslim League, out to subvert the unity and independence of India and create Pakistan. ⁴³ A vote for Mandal was therefore a vote for Pakistan.

Voting in the 1946 election throughout India was highly partisan: the Muslim League got 74.7 per cent votes in the Muslim constituencies, while Congress got 80.9 per cent votes in the General constituencies. ⁴⁴ When so much was at stake, it was not surprising that Congress would mobilize all its power and resources to defeat Mandal who had crossed the line twice, once by going over to the AISCF and then by aligning with the Muslim League. In this politics of representation, while the Muslim League claimed to represent all Muslims—thus condemning ‘nationalist’ Muslims like Maulana Azad as Congress ‘show boys’ ⁴⁵ —the Congress too claimed to represent all Hindus, including the Dalit—thus, branding Mandal a stooge in the hands of the Muslim League.

Another explanation for Mandal and the AISCF’s electoral debacle perhaps lay in what we identified as the political geography of Dalit movements in Bengal. The AISCF was launched here in May 1943, and in less than three years it could not build an organizational network spread evenly across the province that could ensure its electoral victory—particularly, as it was fighting against a ubiquitous Congress with its extensive organization and endless resources. The divisions and rivalries within the ranks of the Dalit leaders did not help either. While it was true that in many reserved SC constituencies the non-Congress candidates together polled more votes than the winning Congress candidates (as Mandal had rightly pointed out), it perhaps also indicated that this anti-Congress voice was not yet united under the banner of the AISCF. And this disunity resulted in Dalit opposition votes being divided among so many Independents.

The organizational inadequacy of the AISCF was further reflected in the fact that in the primary election, out of thirty reserved seats in the province, it could field candidates only in seven, and its ally Kshatriya Samity contested five seats. So it was only twelve out of thirty seats that the AISCF and its ally could find candidates for. In total, fifteen seats were uncontested, out of which thirteen went to Congress, Kshatriya Samity got one seat and another went to an Independent candidate. If we look at the geographical distribution of these uncontested seats, the spatial limitation of AISCF politics would at once become clear. These seats were mostly located in west and central Bengal districts of Burdwan, Birbhum, Bankura, Midnapore, Murshidabad, 24-Parganas and Malda. In this entire region—being outside the Rajbansi and Namasudra habitation zones—Dalit movement was historically weak, ⁴⁶ and therefore AISCF remained unrepresented. ⁴⁷ In the whole of India, it failed to field candidates in the primary elections in as many as 129 out of the 151 reserved seats, indicating a limitation of the geographical spread of its organizational network to match that of Congress, and it obviously had an impact on the overall seat share in the election. ⁴⁸ The limitation only reflected the Dalit’s peculiar position as a ‘territorially dispersed minority’; ⁴⁹ not everywhere did they have that spatial concentration and consequent capacity to mobilize.

But the electoral debacle throughout India spelled a crisis for the AISCF, as the Cabinet Mission that visited India shortly after, basing its argument on overall seat share, refused to recognize it as the legitimate representative of the SCs. The SCs were not recognized as a separate minority group and the interim government that was constituted included only the Congress leader Jagjivan Ram as the sole representative of such communities. To protest against this shifting of state patronage, Ambedkar launched a non-violent passive resistance or satyagraha campaign in Poona from 15 July 1946, and it gradually spread to other parts of North and central India. ⁵⁰ The Bengal branch of the AISCF took up the cause in earnest. As Mandal wrote to Ambedkar, to protest against the Cabinet Mission decision, ‘we took out a very very big procession on 24.7.46. The procession was about half a mile in length consisting of several thousands of people … covering a distance of about 10 miles. It was an unprecedented affair in Calcutta.’ ⁵¹

If this was the beginning, the movement was soon to gather further momentum in the province. Fifteenth August 1946 was observed as the ‘anti-Poona Pact Day’. According to a police report, ‘a procession of 200 persons’ paraded through different streets of central Calcutta, finally converging at the foot of the Calcutta Monument (now known as Shaheed Minar), where a meeting took place. Azad, on the other hand, described it as ‘a huge procession’, as people from practically all parts of the city poured in to join. At the meeting, Mandal and other speakers congratulated the satyagrahis in Poona and condemned the Cabinet Mission and the Congress for ignoring the legitimate demands of the Dalit. Mandal gave indication of a prolonged campaign against both the British and the Congress in association with the Muslim League, which had lent support to their cause. ⁵² Following this, meetings of different sizes took place in the interior under the auspices of the Federation. About 300 people paraded through the main roads of Jessore under the leadership of Amulyadhan Ray. Later in a meeting, the leaders condemned the Cabinet Mission’s decision and argued that they had been duped by the caste Hindu leaders. Then in Kharagpur, on 17 August, about 200 people attended a meeting and expressed solidarity with Ambedkar. About 1,500 people joined a procession in Kanchrapara, while 150 attended a meeting in Bakarganj. ⁵³ About fifty Dalit students marched through the streets of Khulna; at a meeting that followed, the speakers urged the Dalit to unite under the banner of the AISCF, and not to co-operate with the interim government, as Jagjivan Ram was not a chosen representative of the fifty million Dalit. ⁵⁴ At a meeting on 1 September at the Calcutta office of the AISCF, resolutions were adopted describing the interim government as ‘a communal government of the caste Hindus’, which was ‘anti-democratic’ and ‘anti-constitutional’. Appeals were made to the British as well as to other allied governments to intervene to rectify this injustice. ⁵⁵ However, this particular movement of the AISCF soon began to lose momentum, as new developments in its relationship with the Muslim League changed the political equation.

Following the election of 1946, the alliance between the AISCF and the Muslim League became firmer in Bengal. Gandhi complained to Mountbatten in June 1947 that ‘there has been a movement to win over to the Muslim side the so-called scheduled classes and the so-called aboriginal races’. ⁵⁶ Jinnah, trying to undermine the Congress’ claim to represent all Hindus, was proactively leading the charge. On 31 July 1946, he wrote to the viceroy that he was ‘letting down the Scheduled Castes, as one of them is proposed to be nominated by the Congress and not by the real spokesmen of the Scheduled castes’. This was, in his opinion, ‘most unjust to a community of 60 million people who are groaning under the social and economic tyranny of the high caste Hindus whom alone the Congress really represents’. ⁵⁷ And when this arrangement still went ahead, in August 1946, he openly charged that the SCs were ‘let down by the Viceroy’ as they were ‘purposely anti-Congress’. ⁵⁸ Later in October 1946, when the Muslim League joined the interim government, he selected Jogendra Nath Mandal as the League nominee to that government. In a press interview, the League spokesperson Liaquat Ali Khan justified the appointment by saying that: ‘The League has always championed the cause of not only the Mussalmans but all the down-trodden people of this country.’ ⁵⁹ We do not know how Ambedkar responded to this nomination, as he was in London when it was announced. Mandal’s son Jagadish Mandal quotes a telegram sent by him from London, which stated: ‘You have my blessing.’ ⁶⁰ Ambedkar re-affirmed his support in a letter to D. G. Jadhav on 29 October, where he also expressed his scepticism about excessive dependence on the Muslim League. ⁶¹

Ambedkar, at this stage, started working closely with Mandal for his own election to the CA from the Bengal Legislative Assembly. When it was impossible for him to get to the CA from his home constituency in Bombay, he filed his nomination from Bengal on the invitation of Mandal. He came to Calcutta in late June–early July and made a fervent appeal to the Congress SC MLAs to gather enough courage to break the ranks and rectify the injustices inflicted by the Cabinet Mission and the Congress. At this stage, the other SC candidates from Bengal were the veteran Congress SC leader Radhanath Das, the Namasudra leader P. R. Thakur—who had by now joined the Congress—and Mukunda Behari Mullick, who eventually withdrew. While both Das and Thakur won, Mandal, through his own personal initiative, ensured Ambedkar’s victory with five (four required) first-preference votes. ⁶² There is no way to know who actually voted for Ambedkar. But significantly, just before the election in October 1946, four Congress SC MLAs defected by expressing their displeasure at Congress and reposing their faith in Ambedkar’s leadership. ⁶³ What their political act tells us is that the loyalties of these Dalit leaders towards the Congress were not permanent or unconditional, but strategic.

The Riots

The unfolding political situation of 1946 also needs to be understood within the general context of the changing Dalit–Muslim relationship in Bengal. There was no dearth of instances of conflict between the Dalit and Muslim peasants in the East Bengal countryside since the late nineteenth century. There were riots between the two communities in 1889, 1911, 1923, 1925, 1938 and 1943–44 in various eastern Bengal districts. But these riots had nothing to do with religion; they were more for honour and land, for which both these upwardly mobile peasant communities were competing. And there were also examples of co-operation and common resistance to landlord oppression and capitalist exploitation. In most cases, these oppressors were caste Hindus. ⁶⁴ But since the 1940s, this competitive/collaborative relationship between the Dalit and Muslim peasants was drawn into the broader politics for representation and communal space. As India started drifting uncomfortably towards transfer of power and Partition, Dalit politics in Bengal also began to experience tension and ruptures on the issue of their relationship with the Muslims and the future of their habitational space. The 1946 riots brought this rift into sharper focus, as Mandal remained a non-Muslim minister in the Muslim League ministry of H.S. Suhrawardy, who was widely held responsible for the Great Calcutta Killing of 13–16 August 1946. It was followed by the Noakhali riot in East Bengal in October. Unlike previous Dalit–Muslim riots, these were parts of a subcontinental scheme to divide political space in the wake of decolonization. In the government documents as well as in Congress and Hindu Mahasabha reports, ⁶⁵ these riots were described as Hindu–Muslim riots. The eleven volumes of the Calcutta Disturbances Commission of Enquiry Minutes of Evidence do not mention the word ‘caste’ even once. The victims and perpetrators of riot are described as either ‘Hindu’ or ‘Muslim’. ⁶⁶ This was a period of death and destruction at a massive scale, when for the state the only criterion for classification, even for dead bodies, was religion. ⁶⁷

However, the available evidence also suggests that many of these ‘Hindus’ actually belonged to poor Dalit working classes or peasant communities such as the Namasudras or Chamars. For example, there are police reports to show that in Calcutta in August 1946, violent incidents and killings were taking place in jute mill bustees (slums) in Metiabruz, in Maheshtala P S (where Bata Shoe factory was located), Dum Dum, Baranagar, Jagatdal and Naihati, where the slum dwellers were not all caste Hindus. Occasionally, in some reports we come across names of persons who were killed or injured or lost their properties in the Muslim attacks. Many of them were definitely Dalit. ⁶⁸ Then we also come across a petition from the president of the Calcutta Leather Worker’s Union on behalf of 40,000 ‘Harijan’ (Chamar) shoemakers in Calcutta. About 1,000 of them were killed, it complained, their bustees were looted and many of them fled. But the government of Bengal did nothing for their rehabilitation as they did not support Mandal’s Scheduled Castes Federation. ⁶⁹ The obvious politics behind the petition notwithstanding, as the union was controlled by Congress politicians, it indicates nonetheless the entanglement of the Dalit in the violence of August 1946.

In October came the disturbances in eastern Bengal, affecting mainly the districts of Noakhali and Tipperah. On 16 October, the Governor of Bengal wrote to the Secretary of State that the ‘communal situation deteriorated in the district of Noakhali during the past fortnight, with Muslims being asked to enrol for national guard’. As trouble spread to other areas, ‘large bands of Moslem hooligans … [were] moving about terrorising Hindus and committing acts of arson, loot and murder, kidnapping and forcibly converting Hindus’. According to government estimates, about 2000 to 3000 refugees had left their homes and were to be given shelter; armed police was mobilized and ministers rushed to the spot. ⁷⁰

There are two contesting narratives on the Noakhali riot. The governor, the Chief Minister H. S. Suhrawardy and Jogendra Nath Mandal (then a Minister designate in the interim government at the Centre) made an aerial survey of the affected areas and came to the conclusion that it was ‘not a general rising of Moslems against Hindus, but activity (apparently organised) of a body of hooligans who have exploited existing communal feeling… [and they are] temporarily joined in each locality by belligerent Moslem roughs’. ⁷¹ In Mandal’s estimation, the number of dead was ‘few hundreds’, and he believed that the figures were exaggerated by panic and ‘hearsay evidence’. He too believed that it was an act of ‘local hoodlums’. ⁷² Indeed, there was nothing to implicate the Muslim League for complicity in this riot. The Muslim leader who was apprehended for taking a lead role was Golam Sarwar, who was defeated in the recent election by a Muslim League candidate. ⁷³ However, the opposing narrative offered by Acharya J. B. Kripalani, the Congress President, who rushed to the troubled areas, concluded that it was ‘previously arranged and prepared for…It was the result of Muslim League propaganda.’ The number of refugees, according to his calculation, was between 40,000 and 50,000. ⁷⁴ Mahatma Gandhi too headed towards Noakhali to stop the violence and work among the refugees.

In the cracks between these two contending narratives, the Dalit victims of the riot disappeared, as all the existing reports present the victims of the riot as ‘Hindus’ and focus mainly on upper-caste Hindus who lost their properties and looked for shelter. But the very fact that Jogendra Nath Mandal was flown to the disturbed areas—because he had ‘great influence locally’ ⁷⁵ —indicates that the victims included members of his caste or other Dalit groups. A further confirmation came a few days later, when P. N. Rajbhoj (the Secretary of the AISCF) came to Calcutta, met the commerce minister Shamsuddin Ahmed and then was taken to Noakhali and Tipperah to ‘enquire into the condition of the Scheduled Caste population of those localities’. ⁷⁶ He toured the areas for five days between 15 and 29 November, and on his return, gave an update to the chief minister on the condition of the SC population. He told the Associated Press of India that he visited

several villages in the affected areas where the people of a particular sect of the minority community [probably referring to the Namasudras] numbered about 40,000. Most of their houses had either been looted or set on fire. Many of these people had been forcibly converted. ⁷⁷

We found corroboration of this story in Acharya Kripalani’s tour diary indicating that he had visited Charhain village, ‘occupied by about 20,000 Namasudras’. It was reported to be ‘completely devastated. Houses were burnt down, properties, ornaments, utensils, clothes and food grains were looted, and cattle were driven away. Cases of abduction and murder have been reported.’ ⁷⁸ We also came across a telegram in the AICC files addressed to Acharya Kripalani, being sent from the remote village of Himachar, ‘almost completely inhabited by people of Namasudras (Scheduled and Harijan Castes) numbering about a lakh or so’, who were ‘forcibly prevented for (sic) migrating’, although there was ‘much lawlessness and people have remained in great distress’. ⁷⁹ Then in February 1947, at Mahatma Gandhi’s prayer meeting in Tipperah, there were among the participants ‘[a]bout 4000 Namasudras including a large number [of] women and children’. ⁸⁰ As final confirmation, we have a report of an AISCF meeting on 31 December 1946 in Calcutta, where Jogendra Nath Mandal apologized for the losses incurred by the SC peasants in the recent riots in these two districts and condemned religious violence. ⁸¹

There is, thus, enough evidence to suggest that the Namasudra peasants of Tipperah and Noakhali, like many of the Dalit working classes in the city of Calcutta, were at the receiving end of violence in the riots of 1946. This violence threatened the Dalit–Muslim alliance that the AISCF was aiming for, and for that reason, this victimhood was intensely politicized. At a meeting on 1 September 1946, the Bengal branch of the AISCF adopted a resolution condemning the Congress for being responsible for the violence in Calcutta. ⁸² On the other hand, there was a concerted Congress campaign to discredit Mandal, who remained part of a Muslim League government charged of complicity in these acts of violence. Bijoy Krishna Sarkar, a Congress SC MLA, asked in a press statement what Mandal, who had lent his support to the ‘direct action’ movement, did to save the lives and properties of innocent SCs who lost everything in Calcutta and Noakhali. Muslim ‘goondas’, he pointed out, ‘made no discrimination between Caste Hindus and the Scheduled castes.’ ⁸³ Birat Mandal of the Scheduled Caste Association also issued a press statement, pointing out that

A large number of Scheduled Castes residing in Calcutta Bustees have been killed. At Beliaghata in Calcutta, the house of Babu Satish Chandra Bairagi, a follower of Dr. Ambedkar has been burnt to ashes. If the Scheduled Castes now launch a campaign against Govt. and the Congress, the Caste Hindus will not spare them.

His advice therefore was not to start ‘a communal agitation at this critical moment’. Mr Jinnah, he warned, was ‘against us’, and he would not give what the Dalit were demanding. ⁸⁴

In the wake of the Calcutta–Noakhali riots, communal relations in Bengal remained tense in the cities as well as in the countryside, as sporadic acts of violence continued to take place, involving people from both communities, including the Dalit. For example, on 28 October 1946, in the district of 24-Parganas, in an irrigation canal called Bhangore Khal, 25 miles from Calcutta, a boat in which Namasudras from Khulna were taking back their unsold stock of jute was attacked and set on fire by the local Muslims. ⁸⁵ On the other side, after the Pakistan Day on 23 March, trouble broke out near the Dhapa area, and a police report suggested that the ‘Hindu Chamars’ of Tangra were responsible. ⁸⁶ In Noakhali at Chaumohani, the ‘Hindu volunteers’ continued to spread rumours and instigated the Dalit to vacate their houses and go to the relief camps. ⁸⁷ Further afield, as police records show, in districts with large rural Dalit populations, the situation remained tense. In Faridpur, although things improved by October, ‘mutual distrust and suspicion between the communities still continue[d]’. ⁸⁸ In Bakarganj, ‘communal tension was high and people were panicky’. ⁸⁹ In Dacca, ‘Apprehension and distrust … [had] almost overtaken them’. ⁹⁰ In Mymensingh, ‘some tension still continues and the mutual suspicion is still there’. ⁹¹ It was within this environment of mistrust that the politics of ‘Partition’ were played out. And the Dalit could hardly remain untouched by it. The Dalit–Muslim relationship in Bengal was fast becoming tangled in a subcontinental political divide.

Towards Partition

It was not surprising, therefore, that the rift within the Dalit population and leadership in Bengal became sharply defined on the issue of alliance with the Muslim League. Following the ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August 1946, the Muslim League in Bengal tried to forge deeper bonds with the SCs in their fight for Pakistan. A Bengali pamphlet entitled ‘To Muslims and Members of the Scheduled Caste Community’ was intercepted by police from Faridpur and Khulna in November 1946. It was signed by Khawaja Nazimuddin, Jogendra Nath Mandal and other prominent Muslim League and Dalit leaders. It regretted the recent incidents in Dacca, Noakhali and Comillah, and argued that since the majority of the Muslim and Dalit communities lived in similar circumstances, they needed to work together. As the British Cabinet Mission denied the claim of the latter to be recognized as a separate minority, the Muslim League and the AISCF decided to launch a joint campaign to further their common interests. And for this purpose, joint committees of league and federation were to be formed in every village, Union and thana. ⁹² This joint movement also clearly identified two enemies: ‘British imperialism’ and ‘caste-Hindu Congress’, who opposed the establishment of ‘Pakistan’ by the Muslims and denied the ‘legitimate claims’ of the Dalit. ⁹³ The battle lines were thus clearly drawn, and political mobilization began.

Within this context, when it was becoming apparent that the whole of Bengal might go to Pakistan, and the Bengali Hindu bhadralok would thus be reduced to the status of a perpetual minority, a campaign was launched for the partition of Bengal. On 31 December 1946, a meeting of the West Bengal Provincial Committee was held in Calcutta which resolved in favour of the

creation of a separate Province called the West Bengal Province under the Central Indian Union composed of areas viz, City Calcutta, Presidency and Burdwan Divisions, Jalpaiguri and Darjeeling Districts and western parts of Rajshahi Division, Bengali speaking Hindu areas of East Bihar, so that the new Province may form a separate Home of all Nationalists of Bengal…

This area was identified as the space where ‘Nationalist’, read Hindu bhadralok, ‘genius and culture’ could flourish. ⁹⁴ The demand was soon taken over by the Hindu Mahasabha, as its working committee at a meeting on 2 February set up a committee under Shyama Prasad Mookherji to ‘consider the feasibility and desirability of having a separate province of the Hindus in Bengal’. ⁹⁵ The proposal naturally alarmed those Hindus who lived in eastern districts and they protested against such proposals which would ‘disrupt the ancient unity and solidarity of Bengali Hindus’. ⁹⁶ But such opposition was brushed aside when, at the Tarakeswar conference in April 1947, the Hindu Mahasabha fully embraced the campaign ‘to secure a Homeland for the Hindus of Bengal’, and Congress subsequently endorsed it. ⁹⁷

The proposed division of Bengal further accentuated the schism in Dalit politics, as it would directly affect the habitational space of their communities. Leaders such as Mandal and Rasiklal Biswas, who led the AISCF, opposed it on the ground that the interests of the Muslims and the Dalit, both being poor and agriculturists, were identical. ⁹⁸ In a press statement from his Delhi residence on 21 April, Mandal denounced the partition demand by claiming that ‘the majority of non-Muslims in Bengal were not behind the demand … and that this could be proved by a referendum’. He agreed that this agitation had been started as ‘a sort of bargaining counter to resist and discourage the demand for Pakistan of the Muslim League’, but in his view the ‘Remedy [was] worse than Disease’. He branded it as a ‘Proposal of the Caste Hindus’ and insisted that ‘the Scheduled Castes are opposed’ to it. ⁹⁹

On 23 April, Mandal came back to Calcutta and met his colleagues on the executive committee of the AISCF. He started travelling across the length and breadth of the province, lecturing against the proposed partition. ¹⁰⁰ He also tried to recruit, with the help of local Muslim League functionaries, SC volunteers in every district to form opinion in favour of the anti-partition campaign. ¹⁰¹ On 27 April, at a meeting in Rangpur, the Rajbansi Kshatriya Samity also resolved not to support the partition of Bengal. ¹⁰² And finally, the Bengal branch of the AISCF resolved on 14 May that ‘the division of the province into Hindu and Muslim Bengal [was] no solution of the communal problems’. It would

check the growing political consciousness and ruthlessly crush the solidarity of the Scheduled Castes of Bengal… While the Scheduled Castes of Eastern Bengal… [would] be at the mercy of the majority community [i.e., the Muslims] the Scheduled Castes of Western Bengal… [would] be subject to perpetual slavery of the caste Hindus. Hence the Scheduled Castes of this province… [could] not be a party to such a mischievous and dangerous move. ¹⁰³

The Dalit anti-Partition campaign took a major stride on 16 May when a large meeting was organized at the British Indian Association hall in Calcutta. The situation in the city was so tense at this stage on the issue of Partition that an attempt was made to disrupt the meeting with local goons, but with no success. ¹⁰⁴ It was presided over by the Paundra–Kshatriya leader Anukul Chandra Naskar, who was taking a lead role in the anti-Partition campaign in south Bengal. ¹⁰⁵ However, the main speaker at this meeting was Mandal, who opposed the Partition proposal on the grounds that

The scheduled castes will be the worst sufferers if there is any partition of Bengal. The caste-Hindus of east Bengal are wealthy and many of them are professionals. They will just leave east Bengal and come to west Bengal. Only the poor scheduled caste peasants, fishermen and traders will remain in east Bengal. So their proportion in the total population will further decline than in the present and they will have to survive at the mercy of the majority Muslim community. ¹⁰⁶

A resolution was passed at the meeting registering the determined opposition of the SCs to the partition proposal. Later, in response to a question, Mandal further clarified that he did not ‘visualise Bengal of the future as a province linked with either Pakistan or Hindustan, but as an independent Undivided Sovereign State’. ¹⁰⁷ At this stage, he was supporting the campaign for an autonomous united Bengal, spearheaded by the dissident Congress leader Sarat Chandra Bose and the maverick Muslim League leader Abul Hashim. It has been shown by a number of historians that in the charged atmosphere of 1947, this proposal had very few takers in Bengal. ¹⁰⁸ This was not a position favoured by the Muslim League high command either. So the Dalit–Muslim relations forged in 1946 were fraught with tension from the very beginning.

The situation was further complicated when, on 27 April, Ambedkar issued a rather ambiguous statement on the proposed partition of Punjab and Bengal. The AISCF had not come to any conclusion on the question of Partition, he announced; nor did it have any desire to pre-judge the issue. The SCs would accept Partition, if they were satisfied on three points. First of all, what protection would the new constitution of India offer to the SCs as compared to what the Muslims were prepared to offer? Second, where would the boundary line between the two states be drawn? And third, if any SCs were left in Pakistan, would there be a plan for the exchange of population and proper economic rehabilitation? Unless these issues were resolved, he would not take a clear decision, Ambedkar declared. ¹⁰⁹ So the AISCF, it seemed, neither accepted Partition nor outright rejected it.

The ambivalence bolstered up Mandal’s detractors, who were preparing to respond to this politics of space in a strikingly different way. P. R. Thakur asserted in a press statement on 28 April 1947 that

As such Mr. Mandal has no right to say anything regarding the issue of Partition of Bengal, which is nothing but an offshoot of anti-Pakistan agitations. Even Dr Ambedkar, who Mr. Mandal acclaims as his political ‘Guru’ does not support Pakistan, what is more, Dr Ambedkar is definitely in favour of Bengal Partition movement. Mr. Mandal’s pretension, therefore, to speak on behalf of the Scheduled Castes people of Bengal fall to the ground since his views of this crucial issue are at variance with the considered opinion not only of the All-India Depressed Classes League but also the Depressed Classes Federation, two most representative and recognized organisation (sic) of the Scheduled Castes people all over India.

I should rather say that if Mr. Mandal had any sympathy for the wishes and sentiment of the Scheduled Castes people of Bengal, he should have persuaded the Muslim League not to insist on Pakistan in Bengal but to work for a United Bengal under the Indian Union. ¹¹⁰

Two points need to be underscored here. Thakur’s advocacy for partition emanated from his opposition to the idea of Pakistan. Like Mandal, he too wanted Bengal to remain united, but his vision of the political future of this space differed. While Mandal wanted to see it as a separate sovereign state, Thakur wanted it to be a part of India. The same space thus acquired two different meanings for two different leaders, who shared until recently the same social and political grounds. This difference was mainly because many Dalit leaders in Bengal believed that the Dalit peasantry, particularly in the east, were already at the mercy of the majority Muslim community—the recent riots had confirmed it. Partition and the creation of a Hindu majority province in West Bengal was their only chance of political survival. Radhanath Das retorted to Mandal that he would ‘not be able to make them [the Namasudra peasants] feel secure under Muslim League rule or Muslim League protection…the backward Hindus will be better able than others to leave east Bengal, since they have few possessions besides their tiny huts’. If there was any need to partition Bengal, it was to safeguard the interests of the SCs. ¹¹¹

To further counter Mandal’s campaign, a large meeting was organized by the Depressed Classes League (affiliated to Congress) in Calcutta University Institute Hall on 27 May 1947, where the speakers were Congress stalwarts such as Rajendra Prasad and Jagjivan Ram. The resolution adopted at this conference emphatically claimed that ‘As the Muslim League is determined to include the entire Bengal in Pakistan… this conference resolves that a Separate Province be formed comprising of the Bardwan (sic) Division, Presidency Division, Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling Districts, Calcutta and other willing Units under the All India Union.’ A second resolution rejected the ‘Sovereign Bengal or Free Bengal Scheme independent of the India Union’. And a third ‘condemn[ed] the activities of Mr Jogendra Nath Mandal … [and] repudiate[d] his baseless Propaganda that the Scheduled Castes are not behind the Partition demand’. ¹¹² The politics of space had, thus, unmistakably divided the Bengali Dalit community at this stage.

What is more important is that this projected space for a ‘Hindu homeland’ was exponentially expanded to include the areas inhabited by the two large Dalit communities. In a letter dated 21 January 1947, P. R. Thakur wrote to Hemanta Sarkar (the General Secretary of the West Bengal Provincial Committee) on partition that as soon as the session of the CA would be over, he would rush home to organize ‘a big conference’ demanding that ‘Gopalganj [in Faridpur Distirct in East Bengal] and the adjoining police station areas where the Hindus predominate[d] might be included in West Bengal’. ¹¹³ Thus, Thakur and his compatriots were not only demanding the Partition of Bengal for the creation of a Hindu majority province within the territory of the Indian union, they also wanted their own habitat to be incorporated into that new province. Eventually, as this movement gained momentum in May and June, this ‘homeland’ was more clearly defined to include the Sadar and Pirojpur subdivisions of Bakarganj district, Gopalganj subdivision of Faridpur district and the adjoining Namasudra majority areas of Khulna and Jessore; as well as Dinajpur, Malda and the adjoining Rajbansi-dominated areas of Rangpur. The demand was for these two contiguous areas to be incorporated into the new province of West Bengal. The story of this well-orchestrated campaign has already been told. ¹¹⁴

What needs to be mentioned, however, is that at this stage, there were calculated moves on the part of all the mainstream political parties at both ends of the political divide to enlist the support of the Dalit in Bengal. The Hindu bhadralok wanted to win over the Namasudras in their fight for a ‘Hindu homeland’. In some of the areas of Barisal, Faridpur, Jessore and Khulna, Atul Chandra Gupta pointed out to the Congress President Acharya Kripalani that the Namasudras accounted for 55–56 per cent of the population, and they were ‘dying to get out of Pakisthan (sic)’. ¹¹⁵ Therefore, despite the apparent geographical absurdity of their territorial claim, the Hindu Mahasabha argued on their behalf before the Boundary Commission. ¹¹⁶ Even the Congress memorandum to the Boundary Commission listed these territories among the areas it claimed for West Bengal on the ground of being non-Muslim ‘contiguous majority areas’, a criterion followed by the commission for the apportionment of territories. ¹¹⁷ On the other side of the spectrum, Jinnah accosted the viceroy in June 1947 with the proposal of a referendum for Bengal, ‘to give the Scheduled Castes the chance of expressing their dissatisfaction with caste Hindus’; but the viceroy ‘refused to be drawn’ into any such discussion. ¹¹⁸

In view of these political cross-currents, it was not surprising that in a press statement on 1 May 1947, Thakur declared that the Partition of Bengal was a ‘settled fact’ and assured his followers in East Bengal that

They should not be disturbed by the false idea that they would be doomed forever after the partition of Bengal. I can assure them that Hindu-India will pay their first and foremost attention of (sic) the solution of their acute problem. ¹¹⁹

But how could he give such an assurance? A report in Amrita Bazar Patrika on 31 May 1947 suggested that Thakur had met Gandhi and was given ‘a sympathetic hearing’. Gandhi was believed to have given him an assurance that: ‘You may rest assured that the interests of Harijans in Bengal will not be allowed to be ignored in case Bengal’s Partition is finally decided upon.’ Gandhi also asked for a detailed note on the areas in Dacca Division where the Dalit mainly lived. ¹²⁰ The testimony of Thakur’s son also confirms that he had met Lord Mountbatten, on the one hand, and Gandhi, Nehru and other Congress leaders, on the other, to secure their assurance that if the Dalit peasants had to migrate from East Bengal after Partition, their rehabilitation would be guaranteed. ¹²¹ With their assurance, Ramananda Das, the Secretary of the Depressed Classes League, issued an appeal to all SC MLAs ‘to cast their solid Votes in support of Bengal Partition for the best interest of the country and the community’. ¹²² On 20 June 1947, at the Bengal Legislative Assembly, twenty-five of the thirty SC MLAs voted for the Congress–Mahasabha-sponsored resolution in support of the Partition of Bengal.

The particular group of the Dalit in Bengal who actively supported the Hindu-nationalist majoritarian politics at this penultimate stage of colonial rule, did not get what they desired from the Partition. Despite their vehement protestations, all the districts they lived in went to East Pakistan. ¹²³ ‘A largely attended’ meeting at Calcutta University Institute Hall on 26 August 1947 recorded their ‘strong protest against the inclusion’ of a ‘large contiguous non-Muslim majority area of the districts of Khulna, Jessore, Faridpur and Barisal’ to East Bengal by the Radcliffe Award. A cross-caste but all Hindu Central Bengal Boundary Re-Adjustment Committee was set up with P. R. Thakur as the President. ¹²⁴ But once the award was announced, it was a done deal and there was no going back. On the other hand, Partition pained Mandal as well, but for different reasons. In a statement signed by him on 4 June, possibly when Partition had become a foregone conclusion, he wrote:

Although I am sanguine that the Scheduled Caste people living in Pakistan, whose number will be a little over 8 millions, will get adequate political rights and privileges, about 52 millions of them who will be in Hindustan under the Congress regime will be deprived of what little political powers they are enjoying now. ¹²⁵

Whichever perspective we take, there is no denying that Partition had long-term effects on the identity and politics of the Bengali Dalit. In Bengal, the migration of refugees took place in waves, not as a one-time movement of a large body of population as in Punjab. The first wave of refugees mainly consisted of the more wealthy classes, mostly upper-caste Hindu gentry and the educated middle classes who had jobs, including many of the Namasudra middle classes, such as P. R. Thakur himself, who could sell their properties or arrange exchanges of properties and migrate to India. ¹²⁶ The Dalit peasants did not migrate at this stage or could not afford to move because migration required resources they lacked. Additionally, Mandal and the AISCF leaders advised them not to leave their land and hearth. Mandal himself decided to remain in Pakistan and accepted the position of chairman of the Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly where, in his opening address, Jinnah assured the citizens of Pakistan: ‘You may belong to any religion or caste or creed—that has nothing to do with the business of the state.’ ¹²⁷ Following him, Khwaza Nazimuddin, the Chief Minister of East Bengal, also announced: ‘Pakistan is not the state of Muslims alone, it belongs to all peoples and communities who live in it and who are loyal to it.’ ¹²⁸ Mandal and his followers trusted them, until the riots of 1950, after which they began to migrate to West Bengal in thousands. This marked the final breakdown of the Dalit–Muslim collaboration that Mandal once dreamt of. But that is another story to be told on a different occasion.

Identity, Religion and Space

On 19 December 1946, when the fires of communal riots in Calcutta and Noakhali had not yet been completely extinguished, the Bengal SC leader P. R. Thakur made a significant speech at the CA, seeking to define Dalit identity for postcolonial India and for Bengal, with considerable amount of clarity. The speech, therefore, deserves to be quoted at length.

Thakur, thus, made a few points clear about Dalit identity and politics in Bengal on the eve of Partition and decolonization. He claimed them to be Hindus, but a minority in a political sense—not in religious or racial sense—deserving protection of their political rights through proportional representation in the legislatures. They were against the Muslim League and its Pakistan campaign and were against any form of partition. But they were also divided on this issue, Thakur admitted, as there were at least a few among the SCs who thought differently on identity and political alliance.

There were also others who shared his views. Manmohan Das, a leader of the Depressed Classes League, declared at a meeting in Calcutta on 27 May 1947 that ‘they were Hindu first and Hindu last’. But he also hoped that ‘in the new Bengal there would be no social or other distinctions between man and man’. ¹³⁰ In a statement on 26 November, another Dalit MLA Bijoy Krishna Sarkar alleged that Jogendra Nath Mandal, inspired by his mentor Ambedkar, was contemplating giving up Hinduism. ‘But it is true’, he contended, ‘the Scheduled Castes will never relinquish their Hindutva like cowards or relinquish Hindu tradition and Hindu culture.’ ¹³¹

But what was Mandal actually saying about identity at this historical juncture? His disagreement with Thakur was not profound, it seems, but politically critical. In his presidential address at the Fourth Annual Conference of the AISCF on 31 December 1946 in Calcutta, he gave an indication of his mind: ‘though we are Hindu, we are totally different from the caste Hindus in economic and social matters’. And that was the reason he and the AISCF demanded separate electorate and would not go with the caste Hindus and Congress, who denied them this right. They had joined hands with the Muslim League, he argued, because it had promised them separate electorate. ¹³² Around this time, there was intense propaganda against him for his alignment with the Muslim League and his nomination to the interim government as a Muslim League nominee. To counter that, at a public meeting in Calcutta on 16 May 1947, he emphatically said that he thought of himself as a ‘Hindu’. Even though he was nominated by the Muslim League, he was a Hindu before and would remain a Hindu in future. But within the Hindu community, the SCs were a ‘separate political entity’, and this fact was at the foundation of their demand for proportional representation, economic freedom and reservation in education, and public employment. His Congress SC colleagues also demanded the same things, he agreed—but while they sought to assert their distinctive identity through general electorate, he and his party demanded separate electorate. And they did not see any contradiction between their Hindu identity and separate electorate. ¹³³

Jagaran, the mouthpiece of the AISCF in Bengal, published an article on 30 June 1947 criticizing Gandhi’s position that the SC would not remain Hindu, if they were granted separate electorate. There could not be a more senseless reason than this, it argued, for, ‘even if the Scheduled Castes temporarily get separate electorate because of their economic and educational backwardness among the Hindus, they will never be separated from the Hindu religion’. ¹³⁴ So like Thakur, Mandal and the AISCF in Bengal were also making a distinction between their religious identity and political rights. In the context of the Partition, they seemed to be locating their identity within the Hindu social space, while their political position demanded protective safeguards of affirmative action and separate electorate. They did not see any apparent contradiction between the two; the only problem was Congress’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of their political demands. And that refusal justified an alliance with the Muslim League.

While commenting on this alliance, a letter to the editor in Jagaran argued that for a long historical period, Muslim and SC peasants in East Bengal had been living side by side, ploughing the same land, sharing the same life style; it did not affect their caste status. Then why was it not appropriate for them to unite politically in the interim government? ¹³⁵ On 3 November 1946, at a reception meeting for him at Jama Masjid in Delhi, Mandal made it clear why such a grand coalition was in the interest of the underprivileged minorities. The Muslim League, he argued, was fighting for the freedom and progress of not just the Muslims, but of all minority groups. If all the SC, tribal and Muslim people could unite, there was no force in the country that could ever dominate them. ¹³⁶ However, this alliance was not unconditional; in another speech, he made it clear that if the Muslim League did anything against the interests of the SCs, he would at once come out of the interim government. ¹³⁷

However, if we move away from their public political posturing and look at their private social lives, it will be clear that the Dalit in Bengal, like their counterparts in other parts of the country, wore their religion thinly. ¹³⁸ Their everyday religious lives were not locked in a Hindu–non-Hindu structural binary, but resided at the interstices of multiple religious belief structures and folk practices of rural Bengal. For example, P. R. Thakur in his autobiography gives a vivid description of the religious life in his own household as well as in his village in Faridpur. His great-grandfather Harichand Thakur and his grandfather Guruchand Thakur were the founders of a Dalit heterodox religious sect called Matua, which incorporated an anti-caste philosophy of emancipatory transcendentalism. ¹³⁹ Most of the Namasudras in rural East Bengal were followers of this sect. But in his household, Thakur mentions the observance of a variety of religious festivities which he lumps together under a generic rubric of Hindur puja parban or the religious festivals of the Hindus. These included even Durga puja, the most popular festival of the Bengali Hindus. But this was a puja of a different kind, where people of all castes, including even the Muslims, were invited. ¹⁴⁰ While Jogendra Nath was an atheist in his personal belief, as his son Jagadish Mandal tells us, in his household the everyday folk Hindu ritual of Lakshmi puja was regularly performed, because it was a family ‘tradition’, followed for generations. ¹⁴¹ It was not Hinduism in its textual form; it was religion in its most private, personal and quotidian form, which had little connection with their articulated political identities.

But what about the Dalit peasants in the East Bengal countryside? Another Dalit autobiography by Manohar Mouli Biswas, describing religious life in a remote Namasudra village in Khulna in the 1940s, also provides us with an elaborate description of Durga puja in their village. But this was a puja performed by an inferior Brahman priest, where more prominent was the social carnivalesque spirit rather than its ritualistic rigours. And these Namasudras rarely followed any Hindu religious/social restrictions: they relished pork, celebrated widow remarriage and ‘did not observe many of the rites and rituals of the Hindus’. As Biswas writes, nothing happened in their family household that could attract him to religion: ‘Not religion, it was poverty that hung like a sword over the head.’ And in their struggle against poverty they were comrades in arms with their Muslim neighbours. So, when Partition came, these Namasudras failed to understand why they could not live alongside the Muslims any longer, though they had done so for ages despite occasional conflicts. ¹⁴² In other words, it is difficult to pin down Dalit identity into a structured religious binary—either Hindu or non-Hindu. It is also impossible to separate the sacred from the secular in their everyday lived experiences, where such lines were perennially fuzzy. Religion had little to do with their responses to Partition politics, which had made their local community relationships parts of a subcontinental communal divide, imputing different meanings to their ancestral habitational spaces. We need to understand their participation in Partition politics within this context of a complex relationship between subalternity, religion, identity, space and political mobilization.

Conclusion

This essay seeks to show that the Dalit in Bengal were neither disinterested spectators nor accidental victims of Partition politics and associated violence in the fateful years of 1946–47. They certainly did not have any agency in the sense that they had little power to influence the ultimate decision to divide Bengal. But that does not mean that they had no role in the series of events that eventually resulted in Partition or that they remained unaffected by them. They had indeed no option of remaining passive onlookers as the decision had implications for the future of their ancestral habitational space. They had to take sides and, as a result, their political movement got fractured and lost autonomy. While one group under Jogendra Nath Mandal and the AISCF opposed Partition and aligned with the Muslim League, and stood behind the demand for United Bengal, Radhanath Das, P. R. Thakur and others of the Scheduled Caste League preferred to retain their ties with greater India and aligned with the Congress–Hindu Mahasabha combine.

This loss of autonomy and becoming parts of the subcontinental political divide profoundly affected both the groups and their independent movements. In post-Partition Pakistan, the Dalit–Muslim alliance soon broke down under the pressure of a rising Islamic nationalism. Jinnah’s promise was forgotten after his death, as Mandal lamented in his letter of resignation from the Pakistan central cabinet in 1950. In India, in post-Partition West Bengal, we do not find any powerful Dalit movement either, as its main protagonists were left on the other side of the international boundary drawn by the Radcliffe Award. When they migrated after 1950, Nehru reneged on his promise, and there was no proper arrangement for their rehabilitation. The disruption of their territorial anchorage and consequent displacement deprived them of that spatial capacity to mobilize, which they enjoyed in pre-Partition Bengal. The worst sufferers of Indian Partition were the Dalit of Bengal, as after 1947 they had no land, which they could properly call their homeland.