Book review: Suranjan Das,Interrogating Politics and Society: Twentieth-Century Indian Subcontinent

Professor Suranjan Das must be one of the most prolific historians of the modern and contemporary history today. His doctoral work on communal riots in colonial Bengal was pathbreaking in its scope and depth. He combined the focus on communal violence with unusual insights into the ideology that lay behind it.

Das sets his present work as being in the domain of ‘new political history’, in which, there is a move away from the elites to the masses as well as a shift from the preoccupation with leadership and private papers to public records and narratives.

The first essay is on communal violence in the twentieth-century colonial Bengal. Das points out how communal outbreaks of the 1940s became connected with developments in institutional politics. The Dacca riots of 1941 offered a good example of this. A new feature of communal violence was that considerable planning lay behind the outbreaks. Another feature was that the people who participated in the riots were not only the poor but members of the middle class and the rich as well. A special result of communal violence was the legitimisation it increasingly provided among both Hindus and Muslims, to the acceptance of partition.

So far so good. However, two statements in this essay are questionable. One is that the secular stance of the Congress gave way to the acceptance of Pakistan as the only real alternative. I have written elsewhere (Independence and Partition, Erosion of Colonial Power in India, 2000) that the acceptance of partition did not amount to a forsaking of secularism. If the Congress agreed to Partition, it itself did not accept the two-nation theory, or abandon secularism. A Hindu state was clearly ruled out and minorities were assured of equal citizenship. It was not the case that Gandhi alone was the one holding on to the secular cause, as Das suggests. Nehru and Patel were also deeply committed to it. Another statement which may be disputed refers to the ‘fragmentation’ of the national ethos which followed the truncated settlement of August 1947. That the post-independent polity saw unfortunate territorial divisions on communal lines is, of course, true. But to describe the communal division as fragmentation, as the author does, is surely going too far. Let us recall that one of the reasons why the Congress leaders unhappily accepted partition was because the other option was balkanisation of the country, as was implicit in Mountbatten’s first plan in 1947, and, partly, in the earlier Cabinet Mission’s scheme.

The second essay on propaganda and legitimisation of communal ideology is based on a study of propaganda literature, especially pamphlets. Some urged Muslims to stay away from Hindus; others to rise against Hindu oppression. Religious fervour was sought to be raised, ending in a call for killing hundreds of kafirs [non-believers].

The Hindu press countered in the same way. It urged Hindus to take revenge for the acts of desecration of Hindu idols and temples committed by Muslims. This was no longer what was said in sundry pamphlets. Newspapers too spoke the same language. So did organisations such as Hindu Sabha and Arya Dharma Pracharini Sabha whose objective was to promote solidarity among Hindus. The titles of the pamphlets by Arya Samaj were indicative of their tone: Islam Tur (destruction of Islam), and Gostkhur [meat-eating] Mussalman, referring especially to cow-slaughter at Muslin hands.

By 1940s, the foundations of a deep-seated religious division were laid. Among Muslims, public opinion was rallied around the idea of a separate Muslim state, bearing the name of Pakistan. There was openly a call for jihad (holy war); Das speaks of a psychological crystallisation of communal identity, which laid the groundwork for the ascending violence during 1946–47.

Coming to the post-independence period, Das conceives of India’s social structure at the time as semi-feudal, semi-capitalist, within which caste and communal vote-banks operate and political parties use religious symbols. The historical examples discussed are the riots of Bhagalpur in 1990 and the destruction Babri Masjid in 1992.

The third essay on the communal challenge in Bengal politics covers the tumultuous decade of the 1940s till Independence and partition. Das does well to distinguish community consciousness from communalism. He also sets apart religiosity from communalism. The former can be part of personal faith whereas communalism is about political power. The latter is a modern phenomenon, a product of colonial conditions. This formulation is close to that made by Bipan Chandra in his Communalism in Modern India. It is clearly different from the one by Chris Bayly where communal violence is assigned a pre-colonial origin. This formulation by Suranjan Das is extremely important today when Cambridge historiography traces continuities in elements of communalism to both the pre- and post-colonial times.

Das highlights another aspect of communalism in the late colonial period, namely the spread of popular communalism. On the Muslim side, we see how the democratisation of the Muslim League also contributed to popularisation of communalism. The League grew into a mass organisation from being a body representing primarily landowners and middle classes. On the other side was Hindu communalism. Suranjan Das draws an interesting sketch of the phenomenon on the basis of his extensive study of the hitherto classified files of the Intelligence Branch in Bengal. A significant feature that emerges from his study is that the spread of Hindu communalism was not just limited to the activities of organisations such as the Hindu Mahasabha, Arya Samaj, and so on. Even Bengali Congressmen, including Members of the Legislative Assembly, treasured a sense of Hindu identity. The Hindu Mahasabha was itself quite popular and well organised in Bengal in the 1940s, partly on the basis of its work in relief operations during the famine of 1943 besides its role in organising religious festivals. For the present reviewer, it is important that the institutional and ideological distinction between the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha is maintained here, unlike Joya Chatterjee who collapses the two and, in fact, places the responsibility for the partition of Bengal on the Congress.

The essay ends with the continuity of the legacy of communalism in post-1947 Bengal. Das believes that the dialectic between community and class worked under the hegemony of the Left, to give the province a reprieve. I wonder what Suranjan Das would have to say about the polarisation in Bengal in more recent years. Did the electoral failure of the Left have something to do with it?

The fourth essay is on the Calcutta riots of 1992 in historical continuum. It begins with the presumption that Bengal was generally less mired in communalism than other parts of the country. This made the city of Calcutta representative of left and democratic politics. It helped that refugees from East Bengal after the creation of Pakistan took to secular politics. But 1992 post Babri riots were communal in nature. To understand this, Das goes back to the late colonial period, and more specifically the terrible riots in 1946. These killings in August had moved beyond the class dimension and acquired an overtly organised communal nature. It complicated the situation that a section of the Congressmen in Bengal imbibed a strong sense of Hindu identity, given that most of the party’s support in West Bengal now came from the Hindus middle class.

We have then an extremely interesting essay on how differently History is now seen in India and Pakistan. History is based on myths, such as continually incite a sense of vengeance. The bid to rewrite history textbooks was part of this Hindu nationalist project, the ideological moorings of which go back to Savarkar and his ‘Hindutva’ ideology.

The essay on popular and nationalist consciousness in Bengal in 1942 questions Partha Chatterjee’s model about the lack of social radicalism in the movement. In contrast, Das would have it that social protest was indeed present among peasants protesting against the landlords’ exactions, movements of the kisan sabha, food rioting, uprisings of the tribals in Dinajpur, Santhals in Birbhum and, finally, labour militancy. World War II saw strikes by dock workers and railway workers. The pamphlets which were circulated were full of anti-British propaganda. Unlike the Subalterns who tend to conceive of society riven by contesting groups, Das tends to see a large-scale social movement of the exploited and the oppressed.

The essay on aspects of continuity and change in the dynamics of nation-building brings the story to the post-1947 period. It begins by questioning what it calls the simplistic formulation of the Congress as being a qualitatively different organisation once it ceased to be a platform for nationalist forces and assumed the trappings of power from 1947 onward. Das argues that the regressive and positive elements of the Congress in the post-independence period go back to the period of the freedom struggle. So, he takes the story back to the non-cooperation movement and brings it up to 1964 with the end of the Nehru era.

Gandhi’s strategy is presented here as one of building national unity across class lines. This meant in practice curbing mass turbulence in the interest of protecting the class interest of the landed interests and the bourgeoisie. This also was the position of a large number of leaders of the Congress, who tended to see the national movement as one of all classes against British rule.

There is a sense of déjà vu in this perspective on the Congress and the restraint it imposed on popular forces: Clearly, here we see shades of R.P. Dutt and of Sumit Sarkar. Das, one feels, could have offered us a more nuanced Marxist approach to the elements of progression and regression in the freedom struggle now that all of us have had more time for reflection.

All told, this book of essays offers us a mode of investigation of society and politics that combines a thick description of a historical process with the sharp lens of contemporary insight. Marxism is the preferred ideology, the major influence over the mode of analysis; yet Das is open to new trends in historiography, to new political history, in which he places his work. At some point, he even concedes space to postmodernism. His political views are those of the left, but they never border on apologia or hagiography. The author draws on his expertise as a historian of the late-colonial period in Bengal to map communalism in its present avatar in the Indian subcontinent.

Professor Suranjan Das has given us a book which we would all do well to read with pleasure and profit.