Subjective Control of Narratives by Bhadraloks

Desh is a fortnightly journal concerned with aesthetics, culture, business, agriculture and contemporary political affairs in Bengal. In the pre-independent past, it had served as a status emblem for middle-class Bhadralok readers. I will interrogate one regularly published column, ‘Banglar Katha’, originally written in Bengali in 1946–47 by Hemendranath Ghosh, a political analyst.⁵ The column discussed the political backdrop of Muslim League rule in undivided Bengal, the functioning of Congress, and other matters of then-contemporary political affairs. I have selected this column because it analysed contemporary political affairs from a predominantly upper-class, caste-Hindu perspective. The tone was measured; it did not seek to disseminate hatred against the ‘other’ community directly, something we find in Bhadralok narratives in the pamphlets of that time. Instead, his objective, I argue, was to orchestrate a situation where Partition would look like the only logical solution.

Bhadraloks were under the deep influence of nationalism since the nineteenth-century Bengal Renaissance. As a product of the colonial educational system, they adopted a rational, argumentative approach but surreptitiously weaving a rationale to legitimise their narrow sectoral group interests. Under the veil of logic and reason, they were struggling to establish that the bifurcation of what used to be a pluralistic space along communal lines was lawful and justified. When Pakistan became a certainty in Indian politics, the division of Bengal became almost a rightful demand in the Bhadralok narratives. Hemendranath Ghosh refers to the terrible clash in Punjab:

The Bhadraloks seemed to forget what ethnographer-administrator H.H. Risley had said during Bengal’s first partition: “Bengal united is a power; Bengal divided will pull in different ways … One of our main objects is to split it up and thereby weaken a solid body of opponents to our rule” (Ghosh 1947a, 76).

While, during the first partition, the same middle-class Bengalis did not allow the colonial administration to successfully ‘weaken a solid body of opponents’, the overt shift of stance during the second partition was influenced by the bloodbath in Punjab. It is not that the idea of keeping Bengal united as a land based on linguistic and cultural unity was totally absent, but the Bhadraloks were not ready to listen to it. For instance, we can look at their response when H.S. Surawardy and Sarat C. Bose proposed a united Bengal. Without a division, achieving a Hindu majority land was impossible, so most Bhadraloks refused to listen to Sarat Bose. Ghosh writes:

Ghosh’s rationale was clear. He was not arguing against Bengal going to Pakistan or India after Partition. He advocated that the western part of Bengal, where Hindus were the majority in most districts, must be separated from the eastern part. To convince his readers, Ghosh asserted that united Bengal meant the domination of Muslims:

Sarat C. Bose’s objective, however, was anti-communal. If partition was inevitable, he proposed that it could be done not based on communal identity but by keeping a linguistic community together. He foresaw that a split of the map considering communal identity as the determining category would make it impossible for India and Pakistan to retain their pluralistic nature of the past. As a solution, he proposed a nation based on linguistic unity which, most likely, would not be governed on the basis of communal identity and difference. Unlike Sarat Bose, Bhadraloks prioritised their sectarian interest over plurality.

However, for Bhadraloks, Hindus were an undifferentiated community. Ghosh writes:

When Ghosh talks about the disenfranchisement of culture over political, economic and academic institutions, it inherently means upper-caste culture (because none of the sectors he mentions had even minuscule imprints of the lower-caste population). But when he discusses Hindu-dominated districts in the Western part of Bengal, as mentioned earlier, he refers to the entire community. Here, Hindus become a monolithic community, bereft of any hierarchical division. He continues, “Considering all these (the rationale for keeping ‘our’ culture strong), a group of people are now demanding a segregated Hindu-dominated state in the western part of Bengal. Above and beyond any doubt, their proposal is more than worthy of consideration” (Ghosh 1947a, 77).

Did this Hindu-dominated space ever have political, social and cultural rights for the entire Hindu community, including non-Bhadralok lower castes? Since Hindu elites were often landowners with an opposite class interest with the lower castes, the answer may seem obvious. Ghosh did not stand with the colonial administrative measure of giving lower-caste people political power either. He opposed H.H. Risley’s decision of ‘safeguarding’ backward people back in 1901 – initially Muslims and later extended to Hindu lower castes. Be it the reaction in 1901, when the proposal surfaced, or when, in 1910, E.A. Gait finally implemented classificatory measurement of the colonial census, the Bhadraloks were always against lower-caste political empowerment. Sarkar, in fact, criticises the nationalist history for not registering the ‘arousal of a storm’ in high-caste circles after 1910, when the colonial census ensured some rights for lower castes (Sarkar 1998, 382).

Ghosh expressed outrage about the violation of lower-caste women in Noakhali and Tripura by the Muslims. This seems surprisingly empathetic. While Bhadraloks associated the lower- caste Hindus with ‘wildness and polygamy’ and proximity with Muslims, which they feared could eventually lead to the disenfranchisement of their culture, they could not publicly support Beverly’s tagging of them as ‘barbaric’. This explains the inherent contradiction in their narratives concerning lower castes, as pointed out by Sarkar above. Such a contradiction indicates their ability to moderate their attitude towards the lower castes astutely. I will return to this topic in the discussion on homogenisation.

Organised Communal Efforts: Bhadraloks and Lower Castes

One of the reasons why Bhadralok narratives on the first and second partitions of Bengal were so radically different from each other is their communal turn during the second. Both through the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, the majority of the Bhadralok elites gradually moved towards Hindu communal politics during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. Joya Chatterji writes: “A large number of Hindus of Bengal, backed up by provincial branches of Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, campaigned intensively in 1947 for the partition of Bengal and for the creation of a separate Hindu province that would remain inside an Indian Nation” (Chatterji 1994, 01).

Bhadralok participation in creating the communal rift involved but was not limited to narrative construction and campaigning. This is evident from Subaltern historians’ finding of a “significant transformation in the internal elements of nationalist consciousness” so that what “was generative of slogans of Hindu–Muslim fraternity in an earlier era … could now [during the second Partition in 1947] generate with equal ease the spectre of Muslim tyranny” (Chatterjee 1997, 34). Building on that, in the following section, I will identify the presence of institutionalised communal politics by interrogating the narratives in the texts.

If we consider ‘nationalism’ as a term to bracket everything – “from Hindu dominance at one extreme to varying degrees of intercommunal fraternisation to insistence on the separation of religion and politics altogether” (Chatterjee 1997, 36) – it will not only blur the definition of nationalism but will also keep the memories of changing shapes of caste domination within the communal fold, the mechanisms to weave animosity, and the cold-blooded planning of riots unexplored and silenced. Talking about memory wars, Samuel Sequeira writes:

Given the post-2014 scenario, it is likely that memories of the upper-caste Hindu involvement in Partition clashes and their narratives have been ‘subjugated, ignored, lost, suppressed … and forcefully erased’. Such efforts also highlight those narratives that either explain Partition riots as an aberration, erratic, and inexplicably irrational or offload the entire responsibility to the ‘other’ community, replacing the memory of them as perpetrators with reconstructed narratives of Hindu victimhood.

Bhadralok attempts to rationalise violence against the ‘other’ community sprouted from the propagation that the ‘self’ was under ‘threat’. Sarkar traced two transitions in the path of Hindu communalism:

The difference between ‘Hinduism’ and ‘Hindutva’ is, thus, marked by the presence of an ‘enemy image’ in the latter. This, we argue, brought an intra-community transformation within the collective quotidian experience of the entire Hindu religious group. Such a significant transformation – one which untied the pre-existing inter-religious harmonious bond at the grassroots – cannot plausibly be explained as an outcome of mere rationalisation and legitimation of the imagination of the ‘Other’. Remarkably, twenty-six lower-caste representatives voted in favour of Partition in the Bengal Assembly, while only five voted for United Bengal (Chatterjee 1997). What brought the majority of the lower castes over to the Bhadralok fold – mostly landowners and caste oppressors – to indulge in brutality against Muslims, with whom they had historically shared class proximity?

Homogenisation

My interrogation of cultural texts bearing public and private memories will explain how Hindutva aggressively pulled the strings, with the help of Bhadralok, to homogenise the internal differences that historically existed within the Hindu community. Nabendu Ghosh’s ‘Trankarta’ (The Saviour) is a rare short story written in Bangla that depicts the riots’ lived world.⁶ The story begins with a chilling description of a riot-torn urban city space:

The news and rumours of horrific events reaching the Hindu Bhadralok locality have petrified people who have stopped venturing out of their premises, worried about their own and their family’s survival amidst the ‘resurrection of a primitive barbarism’. The focus then shifts to the domestic space of a Bhadralok family, where Boses have gathered and are talking among themselves in English, the rulers’ language. They are considering a move to Bhawanipur, comparatively safe for the Hindu community, in their personal car. However, one of them, Mr Bose, is against moving out: “Well, you can lose your life on the road before reaching there.” Rather, he prefers to organise a defence committee meeting to decide security measures for the ‘community’. No lower-caste representative is invited to the meeting. The narrative keeps oscillating between the domestic space of the Bose family and the slum dwellers, mainly poor working men and women, to delineate the degree of dissimilarity between them, where one is necessarily ashamed of the other’s existence.

Their ‘tiny and godforsaken existence’ is nothing but an utter embarrassment to the ‘elite and Bhadralok locality’. The difference between them involves not just caste but also economic, cultural, educational, and status disparities. Although inhabitants of the same locality, they live in two different worlds – religious identity is hardly a unifying thread over their unsettling juxtapositions.

The meeting begins with Mr Bose, as the meeting president, opening the discussion:

The protagonist here proposes to forget internal differences between castes and prioritise their common religious identity. The meeting results in the unanimous decision that the lower- caste people, the Doms, need to be bribed and deceived through their leader, Jhogru, to draw them into the riots for the security of the ‘community’. Riot as a historical configuration sharpens the self-interest of all the groups. In other words, every group is made to believe that their interest is served by participation in the riots. Following the meeting, Jhogru is called, and Mr Bose requests him to take a seat to make him feel as though he (Jhogru) belongs to the community fold. This description resembles Ambedkar’s statement, ‘A caste has no feeling that it is affiliated to other castes except there is a Hindu-Muslim riot’ (Ambedkar 2014, 50).

Further interaction between Mr Bose and Jhogru is as follows:

Here, the intent does not seem to be to bribe; rather, Mr Bose, an archetypal, anglicised upper-caste Bhadralok figure, decides to call Jhogru ‘brother’, and the magic happens. Jhogru, ‘overwhelmed’, is made to believe that he and his community truly belong to the broader Hindu community. Thus, Mr Bose draws Jhogru and his folks into protecting the ‘community’ by joining the communal clashes. The story ends with Jhogru dead after saving the Bhadraloks that night and Mr Bose moving to Bhawanipur, a safe place. Mr Bose feels no guilt. He believes he has compensated the loss with some fifty rupees given as a ‘bribe’. In this story, the upper caste succeeds in scapegoating the lower castes.

In another short story, Ijjat (The Honor), written by Narayan Gangopadhyay, the protagonist from a lower caste, Jagannath Sarkar, has elevated his social status to a Brahmin. He acts what he feels is the rightful duty of a Brahmin – to arouse fear of Muslim tyranny – and promises to bleed the ‘enemy’, if needed.

Earlier, Jagannath did not belong to the Bhadralok community. Despite keeping a half-foot Tiki, he feels insecure about his new-found elevated location. He believes that carrying forward the hate narratives of Bhadralok will help him permanently secure his position. Hence, he tries to go to the extent even Bhadraloks cannot. He says he can shed the enemy’s blood. He becomes a person who not only narrates but promises to perform necessary actions as well.

Jhogru, the character in Nabendu Ghosh’s short story, thought participating in violent action might let him and his caste integrate with the community. The same is the case of Jagannath, who thinks creating narratives like Bhadraloks and performing violent acts will make him indispensable to the community. Jhogru and Jagannath are not positioned in the same hierarchy, but their participation against the enemy, the ‘Other’, can potentially earn a better position in the Hindu community, at least in their imagination.

One of the major objectives of Hindutva communalism is to bring different caste groups under a common umbrella despite their hierarchical differences. Studies in social history have shown such a line was not fortuitously adopted on the eve of Partition. Sumit Sarkar has mapped the transition from Hinduism towards Hindutva (Sarkar 1998). He found in the Adhikari-bheda⁷, one of the doctrines of caste division (dated mid and late nineteenth century), the explanation of the division of caste as placing everyone in the appropriate place in the social hierarchy within a unified system. However, contrary to the Adhikari-bheda’s suggestions, when E.A. Gait’s proposal of politically empowering lower castes in 1901 came up, a section of upper-caste Hindus raised issues such as Muslim tyranny, the disintegration of Hindu society, and the decline of Hindu numbers relative to Muslims through books and pamphlets. For example, Hindu: A Dying Race (1909) by U.N. Mukherji suggested unification as the only way out under the circumstances of Muslim growth and Hindu demographic decline based on census data and prediction, ‘a purely derivative discourse’ (Sarkar 1998, 387).

While Sanskritisation was initially proposed as an important step for lower-caste upliftment by a dogmatic section of the Bhadralok community, Digindranarayan Bhattacharji’s Jati- Bheda (1912) came out with a sharp anti-caste argument and suggested abandoning Sanskritisation. Bhattacharji found it was making the hierarchy stronger instead of reducing it as upwardly mobile Namasudras and Mahisyas were distinguishing themselves sharply from Chandals and Kaivartas (Sarkar 1998, 384). Beginning with Mukherji and Bhattacharji, most of the leading lights of Hindutva, including Shraddhanand, Savarkar, Hedgewar and Golwalkar⁸, advocated for the reduction of caste barriers and unification of the community by using Hindu religious identity as a cultural thread and Bharatvarsha as a place of indigenous origin, along with an anti-Muslim thrust. In the second decade of the century, this became the official line of the Hindutva-espousing RSS and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), with the RSS leader K.S. Sudarshan later commenting, “difference, in fact, could be celebrated as so many flowers making up the single garland of Hinduism” (Sarkar 1998, 387). While homogenisation of internal differences was a step advocated and implemented by the RSS later as the mechanism to ensure the lower castes ‘fell on’ Islamic others, it can be said to have initially sprouted from Bhadralok brains as the solution for Hindu demographic decline and need for lower-caste elevation in the context of Bengal at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Building on Sarkar’s observation that the ‘link between demographic decline and need for lower caste upliftment did play a significant role in the turn towards Hindutva in the early 20s’ (Sarkar 1998, 387), I argue that during the second to fourth decades of the twentieth century, a sustained process was underway on the part of communal Bhadralok narrators to convince the rest of the upper-caste community about the need for inclusion of lower castes. This unity also depended on the “sustenance of the notion of Muslims as an ever-present, existential threat” (Sarkar 1998, 388). Like the rationalisation narratives I discussed in the previous section, homogenisation narratives were also tailor-made for the Bhadralok audience; the objective was to reconfigure their perspectives towards lower castes in the changed circumstances.

Rumours, Manufactured Information and Ethics of Enmity

Another important factor that made violence possible was misleading people with manufactured information about deaths, rapes and counter-attacks. Exaggerated figures of casualties and much-amplified threats of further attacks drove people into action. As the city of Calcutta remained segregated into Hindu and Muslim neighbourhoods from Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) up to the Declaration of Independence, news items about happenings in other places were fabricated. People, utterly panicked, ran to safe places where a large number of people from the same community lived. Frightened people hardly verified the information reaching them. Tapan Raychoudhuri, in his autobiography, Bangal-Nama, recalls how the scenario before the riots created phantasmagoria, where the difference between ‘truth’ and ‘false’ became narrow. He talks of people being fed manufactured narratives, with even newspapers full of false news:

Printed newspapers containing ‘news’ regarding attacks, counter-attacks and brutality were pressed into service to manufacture disinformation. The increase in sales that Raychoudhuri mentions indicates the high, large-scale consumption of those manufactured narratives. If disinformation is presented through a trustworthy medium, such as a printed newspaper, instead of merely verbally, the impact would be stronger. Along with newspapers, leaflets were circulated to call for action. Ishaan Mukherjee, who has worked with empirical evidence of the Calcutta riot, quotes one original leaflet: “The outraged mothers and sisters must be avenged. The souls of the dead Hindu brethren remain unsatiated … This dark Diwali needs to be coloured with the blood of the Pakistani Muslims” (Mukherjee 2017, 275). (my italics) This leaflet depicts two of the major thematic building blocks of enmity: blaming and revenge. It tries to reconfigure the violent acts within the permissibility of ethics, presenting it as the performance of duty, an act of necessity. Such necessary actions, in the form of sacrificial ‘blood-letting for building a strong nation’, I have argued, were particularly assigned to lower castes. But some leaflets addressed to Bhadraloks. The leaflet, ‘Andhakarachchanana Dipaboli K Pak Muslimer Rokte Ronjito Koria Tulibar Daitto Loite Hoibe’, presents a Sanskritized sadhu Bengali (opposed to chalti or colloquial language) marked with Tatsama⁹ words, which proves the caste and educational status of the writer who, it can be plausibly argued, was of Bhadralok origin. Paul Brass has observed: “In the last days of British Raj, it was not only the case that violence occurred as a consequence of Partition, but violence was a principal mechanism for creating the condition for Partition” (Brass 2006, 76). As this paper finds, in the eastern part of the undivided nation, a certain section of Bhadraloks adopted all possible narratives to paint violence as a ‘principal mechanism’ to create ‘the condition for Partition’. It involved but was not limited to the depiction of such violent actions as courageous acts, divine and godly, for the sake of safeguarding religion, family and society.

Enmity and the Changed Shapes of Remembering

In Bhadralok’s painful memories of the Partition, enmity has lived on and become part of the public discourses that influence personal and collective memory. For instance, Chere Asa Gram (in English. the abandoned village) is a collection of life stories that were first serially published in a Bengali newspaper, Jugantar, from 1950 onward and later collected in this book in 1975 by Dankshinaranjan Basu. It recounts the memories of 67 authors of their native villages in East Bengal, from where they migrated to West Bengal. In one such story, the anonymous author says:

Evidently, the memory of a happy, harmonious pre-Partition past is inseparable from retaliation and hatred during a riot. In other words, it is as though happy memories are not directly accessible from the narrator’s present spatiotemporal location, and the violent memory becomes a metaphorical border in the memorial terrain between two periods marked by happiness and inconsolable sufferings. In the literal sense of the word, the border becomes a complex line in the perception of refugees. To them, the border legitimises violence. The memory of their inexplicable loss and the desire to exact revenge as an ethical choice are influenced by their new spatiotemporal context, where Bhadralok narratives dominate the public discourses.

This notion of revenge has been unbelievably powerful. Even after conversion to non- mainstream, reformist chords of the Hindu religion, their hostility towards Muslims does not necessarily go away. For instance, a lower-caste interviewee, Anil Bain, in Manan Kumar Mandal’s collection of oral narratives of Partition, recalls:

Even after conversion to the Matua sect and after the passage of so many years, Bain still feels the ‘venom’ that was infused during and before Partition by the Bhadraloks. Enmity towards Muslims was not limited to Bhadraloks nor migrating selves; its power extended to converted selves as well. In Anil Bain’s case, the national identity has changed after migration, as has the religious identity, but the venom remains.

Similarly, in Anindya Raychaudhuri’s work, one of the interviewees, Geeta, a Hindu upper- caste migrant woman, vehemently expresses this animosity:

This choice of seeing the present is inseparably connected to the experience of the ‘Other’ as enemies in the past, as an outgroup, as hated bodies. Memory as a highly contested space is often influenced by today’s personal identities that peripheralise some and hegemonise others, leaving less space for forgetting and forgiving. Sometimes, they become the building blocks for a selectively cropped nationalist narrative. The forms of memory narratives explored here significantly influence the shaping of patterns of remembering. These have produced a new, intolerant way of looking at Muslims not only as the ‘Other’ but also as the historicised enemy.

Notes

1. “In 1947, Bengal was divided again, following the horrific clash between Hindu and Muslims … The second and definitive partition of Bengal was preceded by an organised agitation which demanded the vivisection of the province on the basis of religion. This movement was led by the very same section of Bengali society that had dominated its nationalist politics since the time of Bengal’s first partition: the so-called Bhadraloks or “respectable people” (Chatterji 2002, 1). Throughout this paper, this category of the Bengal population is referred to as Bhadraloks. A caveat: Bhadraloks were not only stakeholders in nationalist and communal politics; they could often be found oriented towards anti-communal politics as well, specifically in the leadership of communist-led agrarian movements like Tebhaga. However, while referring to the Bhadraloks as a subset of the Hindu Bengali community in this paper, I mean the communal section, oscillating between nationalist and organised communal politics.

2. This was a Fazlul Huq-led coalition of Krishak Praja Party and Muslim League which adopted measures that set aside many provisions that earlier benefitted Hindu elites.

3. This is evident in a statement issued by the PWA reminding the organisers of their task: “We (the undersigned) realise that the main job of all patriotic intellectuals and writers in this grave and critical hour for our country is to fight communalism in all its manifestations and to do all we can to stop bitterness, ill-will, and enmity between Indian and Indian, between Hindu and Muslim from spreading. We have to work not only by appealing to the essential humanity and rousing the basic patriotism of our people, not only by exposing the sinister game of imperialism and its willing and unconscious agents but through depicting the glorious example of unity from day to day life and common struggle for our people’ (Pradhan 2009, 187).

4. All the necessary sections of the primary materials are translated by me.

5. The column was periodically published during 1946–47. The original Bengali column is digitally accessible: www.amarboi.com/2018/08/desh-patrika-archive.html (Desh 1946 (April–July) and Desh 1947 (January–March, March–June, September–December).

6. Nabendu Ghosh’s ‘Trankarta’ and Narayan Gangopadhyay’s ‘Ijjat’ are two short stories written in Bengali, which are available in a collection of short stories edited by Bhadreswar Mandal (1965). I have translated the excerpts included here.

7. AdhikariBheda is a theological doctrine that validates caste hierarchy in Hindu society. Sumit Sarkar has cited the text in ‘Identity and Difference’ to show the enormous impact this text had in the pre-1920 phase over Bhadralok readership, to highlight the violations of its mandates, marking an overt shift of Bhadralok stances regarding lower caste Hindus in post-1920s.

8. Golwalkar. M.S. Bunch of Thoughts. archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.201991/ 2015.201991.Bunch-Of_djvu.txt. Accessed 11 November 2021.

9. Tatsama are the Sanskrit loan words in Indo-Aryan languages like Bangla, Odiya, Assamese etc. This shows that the narrator is well-versed in the much more sophisticated version of the Indo-Aryan language and its chords rooted in the classical tradition.

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