Caste and Communal Politics in South Asia (Department of History, University of Calcutta, Monograph 8) 8170741378, 9788170741374

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DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF. CALCO'I'TA,

MONOGRAPH 8

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Caste and Communal Politics in South Asia

· Editors

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Sunmjan Das and

S..kbar Bando,-dhyay

KP BAGCW & COMP~ · New Delhi Calcutta

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First Pllblulud 1993

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K P Baachi & Company 286 B. B. Ganguli Street, Calcutta-700 012 1-1896 Cbittaranjan Par~. New Dclhi-110 019

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© Department of History, U Diversity of Calcutta and authors ISBN 81-7074-13 7-8 The publications bas been subsidised by University of Calcutta

Published by K K Baachi on behalf of KP Baachi & Company, 286 B. B. Ganguli Street, Calcutta-700 012 and printed by Shankar Dey at Sreema Mudran, 8B, Sbibnarayan Du Lane, Calcutta-700 006.

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PREFACE This volume brings together . some recent research on caste and communal politics which is undennining the delicate balance upon which the plural society rests in post-independent India. Social discrimination embedded in die structure of Indian society-lies at the root of caste conftict, and this certainly pre~ dates colonial rule. But what occurred under the British Raj was an official legitimisation of caste identity and a consequent politicisation of caste conflict. Caste then became a reference point for the distribution of colonial patron.. Unfortunately the_ Indian nation state has failed to rid itself of such ·c olonial legacies. . . Heightened caste tensions in the wake of the publication of the Mandal Commission Report have recently induced social scientists to look afresh at the past in a bid to find a suitable solution to an age-old problem. On the other hand, whether or not communalism in the sense of Hindu-Muslim antagonism had a pre-colonial history remains a debatable issue. But there is no doubt that communalism devoloped as a major irritant for nationalist politics during the colonial period. While colonialism ensured the transition from community consciousness to communalism, the Indian mainstream nationalism failed to adequately confront the ~ommunal issue. Not surprisingly, the fond hope that the partition of the subcontinent along religious lines would resolve the communal antagonism has been sadly belied. The communal backlash following the demolition of the Bahri Masjid on 6 December 1992 has undermined the secular and democratic presuppositions of Indian federal polity. Historical scholarship in India today cannot afford to ignore its social responsibility to meet this challenge to India's com,p osite culture. The publication of the present volume will hopefully make a significant contribution to a rational understanding of India's political and social history. We are deeply indebted to Professor Barun De for contributing an introductory essay and his generous help in editing the volume. We would also like to express our gratitude to Professor Bharati Ray, the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Academic) of our University, for her help and encouragement in all academic pursuits.

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Our colleagues in the Department, especially Bhaskar Chalcravarti, Basudeb Chattopadhyay, Harl Vasudevan and Aron • Bandopadhyay too lent helping hands without which the volume would not have seen light of the day. Rajsekhar· Basu deserves a special mention for his assistance in preparing the volume. We would ·also like to take this opportunity to record our thanks to #the Department of History, University of Calcutta, for sponsoring the publication of this book under its Special Assistance Programme: •

8 March 1993 Department of History, University of Calcutta

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Suranjan Das Sekhar Bandopadhyay

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co A Note on the Contributors

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1. · Itttroduction: 'A Mirxor Cracked f,om ·Sido t\'Y'Slde' --Colonialism, aass, Caste, and Com.munalism • i8Gr101 . '/M

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2. The Communal Riots in 'Tlnnevclli ·-in 1899: ·Some :;aeao

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Arun Bandopadhyay 3. ..Colooialism, .eonmun.- ~ :Labom : a · Beta:J,our~d. '.t,f~r Qf .C~ouspess and Expetjen~e Qf the Calcutta. Juk: ¥iU Wo~~errs. ~88~ ~ 9 30 ••• Pari,,,al Ghosh .. 4. A Background Study to ·the Emergence of Caste Consciousness in Coastal Andhra Pradesh • V. Ramakrishna

5. Casteism and the Communal Award : 1932

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Ha.ri Banerjee 6. A Peasant Caste in Protest: The Namasudras of Eastern Bengal, 1872-1945

Sekhar Bandopadhyay 7. Propaganda and the Legitimisation of Communal Ideology : Patterns and Trends in Bengal,. 19051947 ' •

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Suranjan Das Index

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A NOTE ON 'nD CONTRIBlJTORS 1. Ba,un De, Director, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad Institute of Asian Studies, Calcutta.

2. Arun Bandopadhyay, Reader in History, University of Calcutta. 3. Parimal Ghosh, Reader in Centre for South and .South East Asian Studies, Universit)· of Calcutta.

4. : V. Ramakrishna, Professor of History, Hyderabad Central University.

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S. Hasi Banerjee, Reader in History, University of Calcutta. 6. Sekluu iJandopadh}·ay, Associate Professor of History, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand~

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7. Suranjan. ~s, ;•R~ader · in History, University of Calcutta. .., . .' . . . '

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1 INTRODUCTION: 'A MIRROR. . . . .CRACKED . FROM SIDE TO SIDE'---COLO CI,ASS, CASTE, AND COMMUNALISM .L&.L,11.........,,

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Barun De

A bit more than three years ago, some time before the events of 'the present discontents' as Edmund Burke would have called the crisis in Indian politics at the North Indian and the Central Ministerial levels in 1989-91, the Calcutta University Post-Graduate Department of History organired a Seminar on the subject of this volume. Scholars from various constituent Colleges of the University, from different Indian -Universities, and from Dhaka and Oxford, attended. Some of the papers drafted for it, based on postdoctoral research, either at the History Department or in the Area Studies Centre for South and South-East Asia, at the University ( the only exception to this local composition in this follow-up volume of readings, being Prof. V. Ramakrishna of the University of Hyderabad's paper) were revised for publication in this volume. All were ready for the press in mid-1990, except this note and the one by Dr. Suranjan Das, who has prepared a topical paper to replace the one he read at the Seminar, which he has since published. 1 The others were written without advantage of hindsight of 'Mandir-Masjid-Mandal' politics : which last year turned 'backward class' and dominant peasant caste agitation, i.e. casteist revivals from the pre-Independence epoch, into Central Ministerial political expediency and the cant of newspaper headlines and videocassette newstrack primetime in all-India quotidian and hebdomadal media. This predating enhances their present relevance and Das' contribution enables readers to get a feel for one young historian's view of the limitations of modern Indian political culture in face of continuing divisive and communal in-citements towards counter-dependant contempt and hatred. Indian

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CASTE AND COMMUNAL POLITICS IN SOUTH ASIA

politics has not yet succeeded in creating constructive alternatives to the persistence of minority or. majority communalism. To be asked, without having contributed a substantive paper to the Seminar, by one's younger colleagues, most of them earlier one's students at a Department, in which one used to be but an honorary lecturer, to think about and introduce a volume on a subject where past and present still has a look-alike character, is a singular privilege. The best I can offer to them is to seek to explain how their work-derived from a variety of themes and approaches, not all connected with average research methodology, on caste and community, subjects which are generally dominated by anthropology·-fits together : and to then comment on its general import. The present volume has been brought together as three pal.rs of case studies of group feelings, not all of them necessarily casteist or communalist, but called as such in reportage by state ·officials. No necessary centrality is attributed in any of them to any mainstream of Indian nationalism, i.e. to the Congress movement's orgaoii.ational leadership, or to political appropriation, as the case may be, of the Indian masses. Their participation in the national movement by the Congress-led freedom struggle is not taken as given. But Dr. Parimal Ghosh does consider the intersection of communalism with mass resistance to colonialism's impact by the labouring people in Greater North Bihar and Calcutta. Dr. Sekhar Bandopadhyay also delves into the possibility of opposition at local levels within some of these movements to Congress and Gandhi's leadership. He ends on the note of the isolation of such subordinate movements in what may be calledto continue the river capture metaphor-''oxbow lakes'' such as the self-ascription of caste nationality by the Namasudra jati. Sekhar Bandopadhyay in his recent Calcutta University Ph.D . . thesis spotlighted ''the weak response of certain lower castes to the nationalist movement in Bengal'' as the product of ''a new social ~ategory called 'th_e depressed classes' constructed by the colonial sociological discourse and subsequently politicised by the policy of protective discrimination.2 . In response to this process these groups began to m:vent traditi.ons to _provi~e symbolic justification for their new i~e~ti~ies~ Their 'littl~ nationalist' ( kleinjati if one may borrow a · usage· from the Germa,n term klein:deutsch) movements were abo. of· a ·par~ul~r view of , history. In this 'caste' ·a ppeared ,to.~. - ~.. CO

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odla Sudn a>r1 11ria,1oe•ir1 like Ba!ijas,_-1_ Boyas to wear the sac1cd thread. He opened a school for "UDtoorbabks' at bis residence and made them abo wear tbc savaed tb.n:al. ~3 This process al "Sarskri!nation' was I' xrally follu-..cd b)- a caste' or sub-divisioo of a C31te when it i1■■prOYCd its matc1i.al status. It desired to do IO by aduptmg Vedic 1il«al, qui••aag callings considered degrading or polluting, taking to ~.-egetariaoi,m. child-marriage, discontinuing the practice of widow 1ee;wniagr and giving up taking liquor and sacrifices of animals and fowls to village-god~. Two exaa,aples may be cited in this cmk:xt, from among the nonBrahmin castes in Aodhra, wt,icb have adopted Brahminical custouis and cereninoiei-,, viz_, V('!lam~ and Kamulis. The .K amsa1is were known to be more Brabminical tban the Brabmin~ and apparent!,· the same was the case with J angams also. l -1 The Jresiden~ of the Depressed·Class UAion in •K umaun, Almora in tlie United Provin~ in _wbi~h he: had said : ''This -meeting declares, its no-confiden~ in .the , Congress movement which has been carried on •in .a nd outside the country and condemns the method adopted .b y the Congress :Workers".76 · When Gandhi heard that at the suggestion of the Prime Minister, the Minorities . were about to produce a settlement which would have the effect of the untouchables getting the support of other minorities and pafticularly of the Muslims, he became an,c.. ious. 77 Indeed .t he Muslims later entered into the Minorities Pact ~'with the object of further fortifying themselves''.78 ·''Thus the minor minorities'', ran an Indian Office Note on Minorities problem in •the R.T.C. dated 1st September-4th November 1931; ''were frightened before long by Gandhi's intransigent attitude into active steps to secure their interest.'' 79 Gandhi was paqicularly shocked when he .came to know the terms of the Minorities Pact which said that ''with regard to Depressed Classes, no change to joint electorates and reserved seats shall be made until after 20 years' experience of separate electorate and until direct adult suffrage for the comm11nity has been established''.80 He was dismayed to find later on that despite his efforts to the contrary, the report of the Minorities Committee had given recognition to the Depressed Classes as a separate political entity.81 He .w ent on to explain ·h is position in the passjonate words often quoted : ''I ·can understand the claims advanced by other minorities, but the claims advanced on behalf of the untouchables, that to me is the •un!k.indest cut' . of all. I would not sell the vital interest of· the u11touchables even for the sake of winning the freedom of India .... a,nd therefore,· I want to say ·with all the emphasis that I can co111mand that if I was the only person to resist this thing, I would -resist it with my -l ife''.82 .. · Gandhi's -.defence of his position seemed at times illogical and inconsistent to the Depressed Classes members at the ·Rou11d Table Confetence.8 3 - Inside the R.T.C. his defence was that the .Hindus had seriously taken up the cause ,of the Depressed Oasses ·a nd 'therefore :there.- was .no reason why-.they should be given -political :safeguards. ·.:Outside the ·.B...T.C.. .his· ·r e ~ g seemed somewhat -different.:;''Muslini11 and· ·Sikbs - ~~,rw:ell.m:g~ed,~' :~aid G_a n~t, -

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"but the untouthables are -not. There is ·very little political sciousness among them· and they are so horribly treated. ·... By giving them separate electorate, you will throw the apple of dis• cord between the untouchables and the orthodox'' ~M Gandhi, it seems, was caught somewhat unawares with the sharp edge the lower caste politics had been developing in India. As C Von Furer Haimendorf wrote : ''with the establishment of the pax B1itannica over the subcontinent and the improvement in communications, caste solidarity extended beyond narrow regional boundaries'. ''Railways efficient postal systems, printing of vemac,ilar newspapers85 and books-all enabled the representatives of a c.aste to spread over different areas to meet and exchange views on their common problems and interests''.86 The growth of caste institutions, hospitals, schools, hostels, publications, all rapidly developed. Caste consciousness was also fostered by the Decennial Returns of the Census of India. The Census Report recorded an extraordinary revival of caste spirit.8 7 The Depressed Oass representatives appeared before all the government· reform bodies from 1919 onwards: the Southborough Committee on Franchise, the Simon Commission, the Round Table Conferences and tte Franchise Committee in 1932. Twenty Depressed Oasses organisations, without any leadership from the caste Hindus, in their representations to the Statutory Commission, almost without exaly of giving certain members of the Depressed Classes two votes is abanduntly justified by the urgent need of securing that their claims should be effectively expressed and the prospect of improving their actual condition promoted. 119 ''For it would be obvious'', continued Hoare, ''that if the Depressed Classes were only given reserved seats in general electorates in which caste Hindu predominates, there would be little likelihood under the existing circumstances that the majority of the Depressed Class candidates elected would be other than mere nominees of the Caste Hindus''.1 20 Thus the Imperial strategy right from 1919 was a veiled encouragement towards caste separatism nearly in the same way as they had created divisions among the Hindus and Muslims and institutionalised that division by conceding separate electorates to the Muslims earlier. As David Page pointed out: ''With each stage of devolution'' Indians were set against Indians caste against caste ........ ''. 121 R. J. Moore also argued that keeping in line with their policy announced m 1917, the British played their communal card in the 1930's in such a way as to ,place the Congress which formed till then the national platform of the Indian democratic movement in a tight comer and then prepare for the next stage of