By Dr Mohammad Sajjad
Papiya Ghosh, Community and Nation: Essays on Identity and Politics in Eastern India, with an Introduction by Biswamoy Pati, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2008, pp. 218 + xxii, Hardbound, Price Rs. 595.
Eastern India’s backward province, Bihar, finds a strange place in the worlds of media, politics and academia. While media and politics often portrays it in a bad light and provides spices to large audiences, the academia also gets swayed by such image makings. As put by Pankaj Mishra, “Bihar has remained cultural and intellectual blackhole. Extreme poverty and suffering lurks unconscionably in the foreground of every book, film or play set in Bihar. Only in passing is reference ever made to the state’s splendid past….it is here that the secular history of India began…” [Seminar,/em>, No. 450, February, 1997, p. 12].
Probably as a result of it, even in the historiography of Hindu-Muslim relations, identity politics and politics of communal separatism etc, Bihar has been studied only inadequately and most of explorations on the history of India’s Partition have confined to the Punjab, the Bengal and the U.P. [This particular point has been elaborated by me in my essay, “Interrogating the Meta-narratives of Congress Nationalism: Muslim Resistance to Communal Separatism in Colonial Bihar” in Islam and Modern Age, vol.33, No. 3, August 2002, pp. 53-85].
J.B.P. More’s study of Tamil Nadu and Madras and Kanchanmoy Majumdar’s recent study of C.P.& Berar are more like exceptions. So far as Bihar is concerned, with the historical generalizations about Bengal (as Bihar was part of Bengal till 1912) and U.P. (as both are Urdu-Hindi speaking provinces), perhaps it was presumed that such findings hold true for Bihar as well. Muzaffar Imam (1987) and then Kamta Chaubey (1990) brought their researches on Bihar pertaining to the theme but their studies terminated before 1930. Vinita Damodaran’s work not only terminated in only 1946, but also it addressed the Hindu-Muslim question with a different perspective.
While Muslim League’s communal separatism has been explored in greater details, the roles of Hindu Communalism and anti-Muslim proclivities of the lower organizations of the Congress, which went a long way in alienating the Muslims (upon which the Muslim League played its politics, particularly after 1937) have largely been ignored. (Joya Chatterji’s work on Bengal on the role of Hindu communalism in India’s Partition is a welcome exception).
Papiya Ghosh (1953-2006), has succeeded tremendously in filling that gap in the historiography of India’s Partition in 1947, making use of all kinds of sources including Urdu newspapers, memoirs/ autobiographies (even though she did not know Urdu, her friends and acquaintances read the sources for her) and oral accounts of various sections/ sub-regions. Through her essays, she explored the subject with amazing precision. Biswamoy Pati has indeed done a great service by collecting together many of her essays published mainly in different academic journals. Her essay on the 1946 riots clearly proves that the exodus to Pakistan did not necessarily signify the Muslim support to the idea of Partitioning India and her other essays on diaspora/ muhajirin adds to the imaginings and re-imaginings of the nation.
They enrich the historiography of nation- making and identity politics in colonial as well as post colonial South Asia. This particular essay reveals to us that ‘even till the penultimate year of the Pakistan movement, it was abundantly clear to the leaders of the Muslim League in Bihar that the Bihari Muslim would not migrate and Jinnah’s call were just ignored’. [For details, see my Bihar’s Muslims’ Response to the Two-Nation Theory, 1940-47, Unpublished Ph D thesis, AMU, Aligarh, 2003. I wish to acknowledge here that Papiya had helped me in various ways to complete my Ph.D work]. Even though the Shahabad riots of 1917 have been studied by great historians like Gyanendra Pandey and Peter Robb, the details that Papiya has been able to collect, have largely been missed by them. It exposes the superficiality of the Lucknow Pact (1916) and the fragility of the Hindu-Muslim relations even before the Shudhi-Tableegh polarization in the 1920s. As we go through the captivating details and amazing analysis made in her essays, we get strong evidences of indictments against the high stature Congress leaders like Rajendra Prasad and Shri Krishna Sinha. These are the facts which have been addressed only by Vinita Damodaran but the kind of evidences with which Papiya substantiates, is something which gives a premium to her work.
While dealing with such subjects, she is conscious of exploding the myth of monolithic Muslim identity. Her essay, “Partition’s Biharis”, takes into account the internal differentiations within the Bihar’s Muslims. These socio-economic, caste/sectarian divisions were/are articulated through different political or semi political organizations and their relations with the Muslim League had conflicts and complexities. This essay elaborates upon the ‘non-ashraf contestation of the two-nation theory in the 1930s and 1940s’. Similarly her one of the most marvelous essay on the Imarat-e-Shariah’s consistent and unswerving mobilization against the communal separatism of the Muslim League, from 1921 to 1947, is a splendid improvement upon the very old work of Ziaul Hasan Faruqi on the Deoband’s anti-colonial, anti-separatist nationalism. This particular essay also contradicts the studies of the scholars like David Gilmartin and Ian Talbot who have expounded that the sufi khanqahs, which also happened to have been landlords, exercised their spiritual and temporal power to mobilize people in favour of the Muslim League’s separatist politics in 1946-47, whereas the Khanqah-e-Mujibiya of Phulwari Sharif, Patna and the Khanqah-e-Rahmaniya of Munger exercised their influence to contest the separatist politics of the League till very end and consistently supported the inclusive nationalism of the Congress and its goal of Muttahidah Qaumiyat (composite nationalism). This work had originally intended to study the institution’s role till 1990s, but unfortunately, she was brutally murdered on 2nd December 2006 inflicting a cruel loss to/upon wonderful history writing.
Her essay on the Congress ministry (1937-39) of Bihar is of special importance for the fact that it catalogues the real (not fancied) grievances of the Muslims against the Congress. Let it be added here that even the best of works on the theme have shied away from indicting the communalization of the lower Congress which provided staple fodder for the Muslim League resulting into its ‘unstoppable’ juggernaut of separatism. [Only exception, to the best of my knowledge, is Mushirul Hasan’s essay, “The Muslim Mass Contacts Campaign: Analysis of a Strategy of Political Mobilization”. In his edited work, India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization. OUP, Delhi, 1993.]
The essay on the Muslim League and Hindu Mahasabha in Bihar during 1937-39, while giving important details, has failed only in one respect. It does not contain political profiles of some leaders of the two organizations. [An aspect which I had shared with her and she had promised me to explore sources/ biographies/ autobiographies of such leaders like Jagat Narain Lal, Chhabinath Pandey, Abdul Aziz, Jafar Imam among many others].
It is however intriguing, why did Biswamoy Pati exclude some of the equally or even more relevant essays like “Recasting Nationalism: Nehruvian Secularism and Syed Mahmud” published in the Journal of Historical Studies, No. 2, December 1996 and some unpublished essays like “Bihari Muslims–An Aqalliat Perspective of Pakistan”, “Contesting the Sharif: The Momin Conference- Muslim League Interface in Bihar, 1938-47”, “Enumerating the Aqalliat: The Bihar Muslim League in 1930s-1940s”, “Shudhi, Sangathan and Swaraj: The Discourse and Politics of Community and Nation”, “Pasmanda Politics in Bihar”, “Writing Ganga-Jamni in the 1940s and After” published in Social Scientist, vol. 34, No.11-12, 2006 etc. In fact, the last two essays included in the volume under review could have been replaced with above-mentioned essays if at all there was a constraint of space. Because the last two essays which deal with the subject of Partition diaspora/ muhajirin, have already been elaborated upon and included into her recently (posthumously) published book, Partition and South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subcontinent (Routledge, Delhi, 2007). It should be added here that this book was a part of trilogy that Papiya was just about to publish. The other two books were to be brought were: (a) on Community and Nation Making: Bihar in 1940s, which has probably been substituted by the volume under review, and (b) on the Backward and Dalit Muslim Politics in Contemporary Bihar.
The introductory essay by Biswamoy Pati should have also given a complete list of her published and un-published essays. Despite being published from a reputed publisher like the Oxford University Press, the book is not without printing errors, even though minor ones. [On page 8, Shan Muhammad has been printed as Shah Muhammad].
One hopes that the manuscripts (if retrievable) of her incomplete works will also be edited and will be brought to us after publication which will question many assumptions of: (a) indicting only Muslim League for India’s Partition, and (b) equating all the Muslim communities with the Muslim League.
In short, Papiya’s works have once again reiterated that the historiography of India’s Partition has not exhausted, rather many more aspects and sources are yet to be explored, and without exploring the Urdu sources such studies will continue to suffer from stark inadequacies.
This review was first published in Contemporary Perspectives: History and Sociology of South Asia, Cambridge University Press (now Sage), vol. 2, No. 2, July-December 2008. Mohammad Sajjad is
Asstt. Prof. at the
Centre of Advanced Study (CAS) in History
AMU, Aligarh.