Introduction
1937 witnessed the establishment of Congress Ministries in eight of the eleven provinces in which provincial elections had been held. Bihar was one of them. The resounding victory of the Congress, which secured a clear majority there, and the dismal performance of the Muslim League seemed at the time to depict the mood of the people in general. The election outcome was taken as a clear rejection of the politics of communalism and separatism, and as an expression of faith in the secular credentials of the Indian National Congress. However, in less than a decade Bihar was gripped by severe communal tensions and had become one of the most prominent parts of India where the movement for Pakistan drew support. This article thus seeks to understand the nature of the communal violence that occurred in Bihar in 1946 against the backdrop of ‘escalating’ communal divisions during the late 1930s and early 1940s. It seeks to problematise the dichotomy that still exists in much literature on communal violence between, on the one hand, moments of ‘extraordinary’ violence (such as riots) and, on the other, the everyday structures of what Gyanendra Pandey has called “routine violence”. Through an analysis of contemporary material produced by the Muslim League, the Congress Ministry and the provincial British administration to explain the causes of the 1946 communal riots in Bihar, it proposes that it is in the moments of rupture presented by riots that everyday structures of violence are trivialised, or normalised, through processes of ‘dichotomisation’, ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘denial’.
Indeed, this article, through its study of the 1946 Bihar riots, proposes that Partition-related violence, like other instances of colonial or post-colonial communal rioting, needs to be understood as straddling the ground between the ‘everyday’ and the ‘extraordinary’. The riots there are almost always discussed in relation to, and as a reaction to, communal violence that had taken place in Bengal earlier the same year. A comparative examination of the two is needed to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of communal strife in the run up to and wake of the 1947 Partition. However, it is also equally important to look at developments in Bihar in relation to the longer-term communal history of the province, not just to discern patterns of behaviour that contributed to this violence but also to be able to locate and identify polarising discourses at work. By exploring the ways in which the Bihar riots were talked and written about in the public sphere, we can gain useful insights regarding how the binaries of ‘everyday’/‘extraordinary’ violence were created and sustained during the period under scrutiny.
Bihar in the early 1940s: forging identities in the crucible of caste, class, religion and region
Gandhi's famous Champaran Movement in Bihar in 1917 (along with two other early Gandhian popular movements in Ahmedabad and Khera) was instrumental in transforming the Congress from being a political organisation with a relatively narrow support base among the masses to one that attracted much wider support, including that of rich peasants and small landlords as well as urban professionals.Footnote 2 In the wake of the First World War, its support base further expanded thanks to the Khilafat and the Non-Cooperation Movements. However, the post-Khilafat and Non-Cooperation era witnessed an erosion of support for Congress among Muslims.Footnote 3 This trend continued through the 1930s and into the 1940s, as members of India's Muslim communities, for various reasons, came to perceive of the Congress as a party that was becoming increasingly ‘Hinduised’.
In Bihar a provincial Muslim League (BPML) was established at Bankepur on 16 March 1908. Leading local Congress Muslims Syed Ali Imam and Mazharul Haq served as its first President and Secretary respectively. Indeed, Congress Muslims played an active part in the establishment of the BPML, and so what was significant about the organisation was that at the time of its establishment it was based on the principle of composite nationalism rather than separatism.Footnote 4 The realisation among prominent early members of the League in Bihar—that the days of loyalist politics were over and that the League could not afford to alienate itself from the Congress—was reflected in the comment made by Mazharul Haq in 1913 that “the anti-Congress Musalman is fast becoming an extinct species and will soon have to be searched for in some archaeological museum”.Footnote 5 However, the events of the following three decades proved this statement to be prematurely optimistic. The Shahabad riots of 1917 were a critical moment responsible for changing the attitude of many Bihari Muslims towards the Congress. Anger at the carnage that the riots unleashed upon Muslims in that district, combined with disappointment at the 1928 Nehru Pact and suspicion regarding the motives of the Home Rule movement, strengthened the idea among many of them that it was no longer wise to seek political togetherness with either Hindus or the Congress. Those Muslims who still supported or were associated with the Congress now became targets of the League, which by then had assumed a distinct anti-Congress/Hindu attitude; they were stereotyped as ‘traitors’ who had betrayed their community. Muslim League resentment reached its zenith during the years when the Congress ministry was in power locally, as reflected in the following extract from the 18 December 1939 edition of Amrita Bazar Patrika:
As soon as Congress Ministries came into office they did some very unusual things … They introduced and encouraged Hindi … thus showing their bias for Sanskritic culture. They spoke of the Muslim League as if it was an organisation inimical to the country… They went further and whenever there was Communal trouble they blamed the Muslim League for it but they were ever careful not to condemn the conduct of the Hindus, Congressmen and Mahasabhaites of whose communal activities they themselves had proofs.Footnote 6
Incidents such as cow sacrifice, the cooking of meat, flying Congress flags on educational institutions, and the singing of the Congress anthem ‘Bande Mataram’, all became points of conflict that could develop into serious violent conflagrations. For Muslims (as the Muslim League proclaimed) these provided evidence of the allegedly communal politics of the Congress and its growing ‘tyranny’.
Feeling of mistrust, however, were not confined to members of the Bihar's Muslim community and vocalised only by the League. Other political formations within the province also contributed to the growing communally charged atmosphere. The Hindu Mahasabha in Bihar was established in 1911 but only became active in the 1920s. Like the League, several of its prominent members such as Rajendra Prasad were important leaders of the Congress or closely associated with it. Prasad, for instance, believed that Hindus had to “have the same right as other communities for propagating their faith”.Footnote 7 However, the Mahasabha, which was based on the idea of an akhand Bharat (undivided India) and a homogenous Indian nation, was increasingly critical of the Congress’ ideology of a composite nationalism. And while the League accused the Congress of a blatantly pro-Hindu attitude, the Mahasabha, on the other hand, propagated the idea that the Congress was always placating the Muslims in order to gain their support:
The Muslim League propagandists are not tired of making out that the Hindus of Bihar are so wantonly aggressive that the life and property of no Musalman are safe in the Province. The Congress Government whose policy of appeasing the Muslims at the cost of the Hindus is too well known to be recounted has spent lakhs in giving them relief and is going to spend several lakhs more to rehabilitate them out of the public exchequer, contribution to which is mostly from the Hindus of the Province. The Hindus, who had equally suffered during the disturbances brought about by the obnoxious and aggressive activities of the Muslim League, were not only denied help but are now being threatened with the collection of collective fines and institution of Criminal cases on charges of murder, arson, loot etc… The attempt of the Muslim League who are working behind the scenes is not only to demoralise the Hindu residents of Bihar but to exploit the situation of helplessness that will be brought about if the leaders and the bread-earners in the Hindu families of the rural areas are removed from their midst. If things are allowed to drift … there will only be women and children left in many villages with the result that can be better imagined than described.Footnote 8
However, it is interesting to note that the communal divide could sometimes be ignored when questions of caste and class were incorporated into the picture. Hence, while the Mahasabha possessed a large support base among the province's zamindars (large landholders), its sangathan and shuddhi conversion activities incurred the opposition of this class precisely because such initiatives threatened to make lower castes such as Gwalas more assertive.Footnote 9 At the same time, one of the major attractions of the Congress Ministry for peasants (kisans) in Bihar was its promise to abolish zamindari in the province. The complexity of the situation was reflected in the following report on the agrarian situation in Bihar, which emphasised that:
The matter, however does appear complicated due to the fact that the zamindars do not propose to take the things lying down and will not spare any money in trying to organise even an armed resistance to any movement contemplated to take forcible possession of the standing crops on Bakasht and Bhaoli lands. The situation is rendered still more difficult because of the present communal tension. But both the CSP and the CPI hope that by intensifying the Kisan agitation they would be diverting the attention of the goonda element in the population into another channel. By this they also hope to combat communalism. The Zamindars have already shown that both the Muslims and Hindus are prepared to work on a common platform to resist any attempts on part of either the Government or the Kisans in taking away their patrimony.Footnote 10
Evidently, identities based on religion, even in the midst of communal unrest, did not necessarily always take priority. The common fear among Bihar's landed elements regarding the loss of their proprietary right over land proved strong enough for them to ignore communal difference and threaten, instead, to wage a united resistance against the abolition of zamindari.
This fluidity of identities and the variations in aspirations is also evident in the heterogeneity that existed among Muslims living in the province. Although Islam does not recognise caste differences, the Muslim population in Bihar was (and continues to be) sub-divided along lines of ‘caste’. These so-called Muslim castes known locally as biradari do not follow a very rigid convention of social intercourse. However, inter-marriage between ‘high-caste’ Ashraf and ‘low-caste’ Ajlaf was not a common occurrence. Among the Ashraf were Saiyids, Shaikhs, Pathans and Maliks. While Saiyids traced their ancestry to an Arab heritage, the ancestors of Shaikhs and Pathans were those who had converted to Islam from among Bhumihars and Rajputs. Maliks, who were mostly concentrated in the Nalanda region, were the smallest of these ‘caste’ groupings and strongly wanted to protect their ‘racial’ distinctness. Mirzas were another group who claimed to be the descendants of the Mughals; confined to seven villages in Darbhanga and Muzzaffarpur, there existed very little mobility among them until Independence. Members of the Ajlaf were mostly descended from low-caste Hindu converts, and continued to be engaged in occupations that followed the Hindu caste hierarchy. Ansaris, also called Momins, formed some 20 per cent of Bihar's Muslim population and were traditionally involved in weaving. In time, they found political expression under the banner of the All-India Momin Conference, which became a vehicle of resistance against the dominance of Saiyids, Shaikhs and Maliks. Hence, the League was never the exclusive mouthpiece of Muslim public opinion in the province, and the razil-sharif divide that existed within its Muslim community was perhaps as deep as the Hindu-Muslim one.
Several key studies on Muslim identity politics have argued that a separatist tendency is intrinsic to the Muslim psyche.Footnote 11 For Farzana Sheikh the Muslim demand for separate communal representation was grounded in the desire not to be represented by non-Muslims, as well as in a sense of historical superiority that harked back to the glories of the Mughal era.Footnote 12 Another oft-quoted theory is that of Paul Brass, which links Muslim separatism to ‘elite manipulation’, arguing that it was a vehicle used by upper-class professional and landed elements to safeguard their own political interests.Footnote 13 However, the case of Bihar offers a different variation on this theme for historians of communalism as here the concept of separatism and that of muttahida qaumiyat (composite nationalism) co-existed within the community. While the League, as mentioned above, came to embody the former, organisations such as the Momin Conference, Deoband, Jamiat-ul Ulama-i-Hind (JUH), Imarat-i-Shariah, the Shia Political Conference, the Rayeen Conference, the Mansoori Conference and so on continued to represent the latter, namely a more composite nationalism.Footnote 14
Take the Momins for example. They tended to regard themselves as a separate ‘race’ with a distinct identity that was not only defined by their faith. The idea of Pakistan as a separate nation for Indian Muslims did not stand favourably in the collective eyes of this biradari for they were concentrated in Muslim-minority areas and did not believe the League to be their representative. The fact that their ties with the region, i.e. the place where they were located, were stronger than with their faith is evident in the central thrust of the address made by Abdul Qaiyum Ansari at at a meeting of the Bihar Provincial Momin Conference, held in Alamganj on April 21, 1940 to oppose the Lahore Resolution of the League.Footnote 15 At the same meeting, Asim Bihari, another prominent leader of the Momin Conference proclaimed Pakistan scheme to be against the true ‘conception of Islam’. The Momins, he stressed, had no religious, linguistic or cultural fears; wherever they lived was their ‘Pakistan’.Footnote 16 But while Papiya Ghosh argues that the Momin Conference was ideologically opposed to the Muslim League, its differences with the League did not necessarily make it pro-Congress. Instead, the Momin Conference was a party of poor, working-class Muslims and its ideology was based on the desire to bring about a betterment in their socio-economic position. This is evident in the following letter sent by M. Abdul Waheed Ansari, General Secretary of the Sub-Divisional Jamiat-ul Momineen, to the League leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah in March 1947:
The Stand of the Momin Conference is different from that of the Congressite Muslims who are very few … Momins are not Congressites but they cooperate with other parties only for the sake of their own advancement. If the same demands of their advancement are fulfilled by the Muslim League, there is no reason why the Momin Conference should not merge with the Muslim League … I am fully confident that by accepting the just demands of poor Musalmans, whose number runs not to lacs but to crores, you will promote Muslim egalitarianism and thus enable the poor Musalmans … to shed their last drop of blood for Pakistan… The following are the demands:
1) Equality in educational development and facilities
2) Equality in Government and employment
3) Equality in the number of Members of the Muslim League Working Committee
I am greatly hurt when I see one brother standing silently aloof while the other is shouting the slogan of Pakistan. Why should we not adopt ways to make both brothers go hand in hand?Footnote 17
Implicit in this letter was Ansari's attempt to claim upward social mobility for his fellow Momins. Clearly he was aware that the membership of the League was comprised primarily of so-called sharif Muslims. His demand that the Momin Conference be assimilated into the League and the need for equality vis-à-vis its members and supporters in the fields of educational facilities, government employment and political representation, may be seen as ways to overcome the afore-mentioned razil-sharif divide. Emphasising that there existed a huge population of Momins whose support for the Pakistan scheme would add substantial weight to the movement was perhaps meant to serve as a ‘bargaining counter’ for better treatment from higher-status Muslims as well as Momin acceptance and assimilation into the mainstream of the Muslim community. As this example suggests, identity politics in the name of religion, community, and caste were played out in complex ways; wherever they intersected, they appeared to contradict their own logic.
The election and appointment of the Congress Ministry in Bihar in 1937 was seen, and projected, as a major point of departure from the previous socio-political fabric of the province. From the archival record it also comes across as an important juncture for the insertion of identity politics into local communal dynamics. At this point, however, it would be useful to return to the 1917 Shahbad riots, which were similarly described by contemporaries as a monumental rupture in the province's communal history. Gyan Pandey, in his seminal study of the context out of which these riots erupted, painstakingly charts the complex and criss-crossing social fabric of the Bhojppur region wherein religion, caste and class identities became enmeshed and fed into one another, even when on the surface the situation seemed to be fuelled largely by religious polarisation.Footnote 18 Pandey's aim is to problematise our understanding of communalism as solely predicated on a divide caused by clashing religious identities. While the 1917 Shahbad riots have been viewed as a watershed event, with “a number of newly organised ‘communal’ demands … injected into the Bhojpuri region”Footnote 19 so as to stir up violence, Pandey cautions against the tendency to assume that “there was throughout Bhojpuri society a readymade ‘communalism’ or ‘unity of faith’ into which ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ demands now all too easily fitted”.Footnote 20 In order to explain this point further, he uses the testimony of a local weaver to draw attention to another riot that occurred in the same region at the turn of the twentieth century, observing that:
Here is testimony to depth of religious feelings, undiminished yet by the advance of an industrial age and scientific education. Here is the appreciation of the different interests of the well to do (zamindars and bade log) and the poorer classes (chote log) as well as the power of the colonial state. Here is a feeling of contrition, too, at the action taken by the Muslims of the town against local Hindus in an unstudied response to a self-interested person's attempt to exploit their religious sentiments.Footnote 21
In explaining intersections of identification and the resultant points of conflict that were manifested in these 1904 riots, Pandey underlines the fluid nature of communal tension and violence in colonial India. The elaborate tracing of the forward and backward linkages of moments of seemingly spontaneous bursts of identity-based violence within the historical context from which they emerged points to inherent continuities in apparent moments of ‘rupture’.
Furthermore, Pandey's work on the Shahbad riots also demonstrates that communal violence often erupted from within its immediate social milieu, and likewise those involved in the actual disturbances belonged to the lived, everyday ‘world’ of the region, even if the reasons for their engagement in this conflict exhibited a range of intersecting class- and caste-based motivations. On the other hand, when it comes to deconstructing Partition-related communal violence, the tendency has been to see it as disconnected from the longue durée of existing patterns of social relationships in the places where it occurred. Consequently, interpretations of Partition violence either take the ‘clash of civilisations’ route or, more recently, one in which it is seen as an aberration to existing modes of ‘normal’ cross-communal interactions with deviant forms of communal behaviour attributed to external forces and actors.
Collective violence, Partition historiography, and the question of agency
For a long time (and perhaps understandably so), the history writing project in the post-Independence period was dominated by nationalist accounts, which primarily celebrated the protracted freedom struggle that had taken place under the leadership of Gandhi and the Indian National Congress. The violence that ‘accompanied’ the realisation of Independence in the form of Partition riots either largely remained an uncomfortable footnote—something of an anomaly—in an otherwise glorious fight for freedom, or was seen as a necessary rite of passage for this struggle to reach its successful and intended conclusion. In the decades that followed August 1947, India experienced some monumental cases of sectarian strife and communal violence such as the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, the Ramjanmabhoomi issue and the demolition of Ajodhya's Babri Masjid in 1992, and the Bombay and the Godhra Riots of the early 2000s.Footnote 22 This pattern of events inspired a new trend in modern and contemporary South Asian historiography that focuses on the nature of communal violence and the motivations for it.Footnote 23 Hence, Partition riots were revisited in ground-breaking works such as Gyanendra Pandey's Remembering Partition, and likewise there was fresh scholarly scrutiny of the large corpus of creative literature in Urdu that dealt with themes related to Partition violence and dislocation in order to use them as alternative sources for writing histories of the event.Footnote 24 As Pandey argues, the history writing project has primarily worked towards “othering” violence and has aimed “at justifying, or eliding, what is seen in the main as being an illegitimate outbreak of violence and making a case about how this goes against the fundamentals of Indian (or Pakistani) tradition and history: How it is to that extent, not our history at all”.Footnote 25 However, for him, acts of violence in which people participate—whether as victims or perpetrators—need historical scrutiny as “violence and community constitute one another” in the sense that both become mirrors that reflect the essence of the other.Footnote 26
Veena Das, in her introduction to the edited volume Mirrors of Violence, presents an analytical framework for understanding and studying collective violence as a form of social action. Her framework essentially follows three strands through which the disciplines of sociology and history approach the structure of collective violence:
The first is that collective action can be analysed by the same categories as conventional behaviour … According to the second view, collective action constitutes a distinct break in normal social life … In the third view … collective action, often expressed in the behavior of crowds, is best understood if we focus upon the sense of injustice which crowds try to redress through their actions.Footnote 27
What the first point of view suggests is that social conflict manifesting itself in the form of collective violence cannot be seen in isolation from how people behave and interact in what may be ‘normal’ times. The question that then arises is what is it that marks the difference between the two and what causes normalcy to give way, at certain times, to violent outburst in a collective fashion. Neil Smelser, in his influential study The Theory of Collective Behaviour,Footnote 28 explains that it is the buildup of strain that causes patterns of conventional behaviour to be excited and for that excitement to be manifested in particular ways. However, he underlines that it is not plausible to approach collective violence as something that is the “work of mysterious forces”.Footnote 29 Such an idea, when applied to instances of communal violence that take the form of a riot, invariably raises the question of cause and agency. If religion and religious difference are what cause riots to happen, then should we view this difference as a fact of everyday life or an ideology fed from above that drives people to behave a certain way, or is there something that links this ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’?
One of the major explanations proffered for the nature of the communal violence that swept across north India at the time of Partition is that it was the result of the inexplicable breakdown of the everyday bonds of community; a moment of collective insanity that drove people to do terrible things that they would not have done in ‘normal’ times. In Remembering Partition, Pandey's primary effort is to draw attention to the multiplicity of ways in which Partition could be approached and demonstrate the need to be aware of the various double binds in deconstructing Partition violence. For him, Partition has “a history not for large, historical processes alone, nor yet of victimhood plain and simple … nor yet of madness natural calamities which swept all before them (though madness is surely one way of making sense of the violence of the time and natural calamities do come to mind) … as a history of contending politics and contending subject positions”.Footnote 30 Hence, while Partition violence arguably represented both the inscrutability of the human nature as well as the pull of political forces, it nonetheless is demarcated as ‘extraordinary’ violence born out of an extraordinary historical time. In a more recent 2006 study, Pandey seeks to look beyond the ‘insanity of the times’ explanation for communal violence in the narrative of the nation by proposing that the very idea of what constitutes violence must be broadened so that it is seen as intrinsic to society rather than something that lies external to it. What he proposes in Routine Violence is the idea that elements of violence are embedded in the very nature of community life, in structures and practices that have become so banal and routine that they seem invisible or unimportant by virtue of being over exposed. This routinisation of violence occurs through a long process of naturalisation through the use of images, through the use of language and through the construction of histories.Footnote 31
In Pandey's attempt to expand the boundaries of what could be counted as violence, he also draws a distinction between ‘extraordinary violence’ and the violence of ordinary times. While the communal riots that occurred at the time of Partition represented extraordinary violence beyond the scope of explanation or description, patterns of ‘routine’ sectarian strife and communal violence are more ingrained into the everyday life of the community or the nation. However, what is also implied is that the violent nature of India's Partition, while deserving of specific historical enquiry on account of its sheer enormity, is nonetheless removed from the violence of ordinary times in so far as it effectively lies beyond the pale of description. The limitation of such a distinction, even in the most sophisticated of analyses, would be that once again it externalises the violence of ‘abnormal’ times. Instead, what needs to be understood is that extraordinary violence does not emerge from a socio-political vacuum and that it is a product of the same structures that constitute ‘routine violence’. In addition, while Pandey attempts to move beyond his own earlier thesis about the inherently indescribable nature of Partition violence,Footnote 32 it is still arguably useful to employ the same approach when seeking to understand the collective violence that occurred in the context of the events of 1947.
The question that then requires answering (or, at least, for answers to be sought) is why some events become identified as extraordinary violence while the routine violence of people's daily lives remains mostly unaccounted for? The scale of actual physical harm or chaos unleashed, or the extent of disruption caused in the ‘daily’ lives of people, is one measure of what comes to be regarded as extraordinary violence. However, it is also how the event is remembered in public memory and what explanations are provided by those who experienced it. Ashis Nandy highlights the centrality of ‘stories’ in the form of narratives of both remembering and forgetting, of accepting and denying Partition violence, in creating a mythology about that particular time in history. According to him, these mythologies become the researcher's entry points into the process of theorising violence. It is the narratives of remembrance concerning Partition violence that often make it extraordinary. The idea that it was a ‘period of madness’ perhaps makes it easier to “locate the violence outside of normality and disown the relevance of its memories”, while at the same time establishing the enormity of what had happened.Footnote 33 But oftentimes such narratives also have the tendency to juxtapose the ‘abnormality’ of Partition with what then becomes the ‘normal’. This ‘normal’ comes to represent a time of relative communal harmony and peaceful co-existence of the same religious communities that become thirsty for each other's blood in times of extraordinary violence.
In studies of communal riots in South Asia, such drastic transformation of social dynamics during riots has been attributed to causes that lay within what was considered ‘normal’, such as property dispute, economic interests and such.Footnote 34 Pandey, while acknowledging that these causes could well indeed be sufficiently potent to stir communal passions, accentuates the importance of looking into questions of agency if we are to achieve more nuanced understandings of what drives people to become polarised along communal lines:
The point is not that land and property are of no importance in bringing about or perpetuating sectarian strife. Rather, the emphasis placed upon such factors often leaves little room for the emotions of people, for changing feelings and perceptions, for mediations and politics – in short, little room for affect and agency. The mass of people have counted for little in most analysis of collective violence … This is one means of preserving their innocence and purity.Footnote 35
Another way of studying communal violence, and yet somehow arriving at and solidifying a similar kind of binary is to focus on what Ashotosh Varshney has called “a study of variance”.Footnote 36 The objective here is to understand which inter-communal social structures engender communal peace so that some places remain relatively freer of violence than others. According to Varshney, the central determining factor for the creation of conditions of communal peace and/or violence is the pre-existence of local networks of civic engagement between the communities involved. The strength and enduring power of these networks during times of stress determine whether they sustain peace or crumble into violence. Varshney then places the different kinds of possible inter-community civic engagements into two broad categories, the ‘assimilational’ and the ‘everyday’. The former ties are structured around organisational setups while the latter refer to more inter-personal bonds of friendship and neighbourhood.Footnote 37 Both forms of civic engagement, when robust, promote peace. However, for him, it is the assimilational forms of civic engagement that act as stronger bulwarks for the maintenance of peace and exhibit greater resilience in the face of “exogenous shocks”, such as India's 1947 Partition or the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992.Footnote 38 Such focus on inter-communal networks of engagement highlights the localised, rooted and historically contingent nature of relationships existing between people belonging to different communities, and not only in relation to politics and propaganda.
However, labelling moments of ‘extraordinary’ violence as ‘exogenous shocks’ once again leads to the reinforcement of a binary between ‘everyday’ and ‘exceptional’. The predicating of the possibility of a place to remain afflicted with or free from communal violence depending on the existence or absence of these inter-communal civic networks of engagement suggests a rather clean separation between communal peace and violence in circumstances where these lines are often more blurred. Can there ever be a complete absence of these networks and how neatly can the two kinds of inter-communal networks of civic engagement be categorised without considering the potential for overlaps and intersections? Such a clear-cut dichotomisation of peace and violence again contradicts the lived messiness of inter-communal relationships. Finally, the study of variance ascribes effectiveness to associational forms of civic engagement in maintaining communal peace. The underlying implication of this is that individual agency/motivations are perhaps as insignificant in the act of committing violence as they might be in maintaining.
The surge in newer histories of Partition over the past few decades has made the inherent violence of the event the main focus of study. What has been the point of departure for this trend in historiography is that such work attempts to read the history of the final phase of colonial rule in South Asia ‘against the grain’, problematising the centrality of the Muslim League in the movement for Pakistan. First, the idea was to demonstrate that there existed historical proof that the notion of Pakistan in itself was never clearly defined even by those who were agitating for it over the course of the 1930s and 1940s. Hence, Ayesha Jalal's 1980s’ path-breaking work on where the politics of Muslim separatism fitted into the discourse of Pakistan—The Sole Spokesman—emphatically challenges the idea that Jinnah wanted a separate nation state for the Muslims of the subcontinent at all. Rather, it was only supposed to fulfill the role of a “bargaining counter”.Footnote 39 Second, there have been attempts to establish the imposed manner in which the process of partitioning was carried out and how the deliberations of the few in power ended up shaping the destiny of ordinary people. Under the growing influence of the Subaltern School of historiography, the focus of these studies has been the upheaval caused in the lives of ordinary individuals who had to live through Partition, the implication being that the majority of those affected were mostly unwilling victims in the mayhem caused by the division of the subcontinent. This approach in turn has led to the question of how widespread and unanimous the demand for Pakistan really was among Indian Muslims, and whether the considerable social, cultural, regional and economic heterogeneity of India's Muslim community in turn affected their political affiliations.Footnote 40
However, without taking anything away their considerable contribution in terms of highlighting existing gaps in the history of Partition, these various historiographical explorations tend again to seek external explanations for the violence that proved intrinsic to it. Arguably Jinnah and the League cannot be seen as sole representatives of the Muslim community and its aspirations in its entirety; Pakistan could well have been the demand for a small elite minority among Indian Muslims; and the mandate as such might have been against the idea of Partition. What comes across in many of these historical interpretations is continuing discomfort with exploring what really caused Partition without the discussion going in the direction of ‘the madness of the times’. David Gilmartin, in a 2015 article on the current state of historical scholarship on Partition, points to this absence in the existing literature, whether nationalist or revisionist, and asks “With the everyday agency of people in most postcolonial literature cast as the antithesis of the statist boundary-making that produced partition's violence, where [can] historians find space for popular agency in the actual making of partition?”Footnote 41
This distancing of popular agency from the events that led up to Partition suggests that people were used as pawns in a larger political game and acted purely thanks to being misguided or manipulated by the rhetoric of vested political interests. Hence, even though ‘people’ are certainly the central protagonists in Partition's newer histories, the question of the agency that they exercised over the decisions and the sides that they took has arguably still not been adequately addressed. Seeking a link that connects what he calls the narratives of ‘civilisation’ and ‘modernity’ in the historiography of Partition, Gilmartin further presses home the need to analyse the ways in which the role of religion can be interpreted as its driving cause:
Influenced by postcolonial scholarship historians have been deeply sensitised in recent decades to the “constructed” character of religious communities. But in much of this literature, the underlying historical causes of a partition based specifically on religion have nevertheless been lightly glossed, and usually assumed to relate back either to a deep-seated civilisational division between Hinduism and Islam, or to a narrative of religious boundaries hardened by colonial processes of boundary-making and divide and rule, with little attempt to bridge the differences between these. Popular religion is often portrayed simply as a world that slipped out of control, as the violence of late 1946 and 1947 spread.Footnote 42
Within the more recent contributions to existing Partition historiography, another major trend in scholarship has been the shift from the violence and displacement taking place in Punjab and Delhi to analysis of events in other provinces. These have effectively rejected existing generalisations in favour of bringing out the significance of local and regional trends and patterns, and examining them comparatively against the larger or ‘national’ socio-political milieu of the time. One of the earliest shifts was recognition that the existing historiography lacked sufficient analysis of Partition in eastern Inda and what explained the rise of communalism in undivided Bengal. The complex social and political fabric of late colonial Bengal, the lead-up to Partition and the role of the Hindu bhadralok intelligentsia in the politics of communalism there is explored comprehensively by Joya Chatterji in Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947.Footnote 43 Chatterjee's argument is that the growing hold of Muslim leadership over the province steadily pushed the once politically prominent Hindu Bengali elite, which dominated the Congress locally, to the margins of the political arena. This then proved instrumental in their growing communalisation and, consequently, in their eventual support for a divided Bengal.
The question of the communalism operating within the structure of the Congress—especially its provincial branches—is also addressed by William Gould in Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India in the context of the United Provinces. Gould problematises two major historiographical trends in the study of nationalism and communalism in colonial north India. The first is that ‘true’ nationalism, of which the Congress was the sole upholder, came to be directly pitched against an emergent communalism that was deemed to be its opposing ‘other’, and that this was a phenomenon that only originated in the context of the late colonial period. The second is that Hindu-Muslim estrangement was an established fact that had developed over a long history of co-existing in the same socio-political landscape that was beset with tensions caused by the often clashing world views of the two communities. Gould finds both positions problematic in so far as the first assumes “nationalism as a predominantly modernising force”,Footnote 44 and he suggests that “Congress's relationship with Hindu nationalism was intermittent and changeable right up to the 1940s”,Footnote 45 while the second, he argues, has not been able to explain sufficiently the “alienation of Muslims of Congress and the perpetuation of religious rhetoric at a more popular level” (as the long standing antagonism was seen mostly to exist between elite Hindus and Muslims of North India).Footnote 46
Ian Copland makes a similarly compelling case for exploring patterns of communal violence in the lesser-studied princely north India in the colonial period.Footnote 47 The main thrust of his argument is that communalism and the occurrence of communal violence resulting from it in these states in the period up to the 1930s was negligible in comparison to the scale and intensity at which it occurred in British-ruled India.Footnote 48 Copland attributes their sustaining of communal peace in the early decades of the twentieth century to long-standing traditions of syncretism, the tolerant and respectful patronage extended by princes to all religious communities in their states, and the fact that relative remoteness helped to distance them from the influences of modernisation that shaped inter-communal relations in colonial north India. However, the same places experienced a rapid deterioration of communal relationships and a sharp descent into communal identity politics after the 1930s to the extent that they became the scene of some of the most horrific instances of violence during 1946–47.Footnote 49 At the heart of Copland's work, therefore, is his assertion that the presence or absence of communalism and communal violence as its manifestation is deeply connected to the binary between tradition and modernity wherein the former somehow facilitates simpler, less conflict-driven forms of cross-communal exchanges while the latter can be viewed as the harbinger of strife.Footnote 50 Copland both borrows from and contributes to Varsheney's thesis on the role of civic networks of engagement as well as to Brass's work on the ‘production’ of communal violence. But this ‘tipping of the hat’ to both theoretical interventions focusing on agency and construction in the scholarship on collective violence, I would suggest, leaves only partially answered the questions of ‘why some places remain free of communal violence’ and ‘why riots are endemic to certain areas/regions’.
Apart from the United Provinces (UP), the other major Muslim-minority province in the Hindi-speaking heartland from whence the Pakistan movement eventually drew considerable support was Bihar. The late colonial period in Bihar has not received as much attention as the United Provinces, but nonetheless there exist strong points of comparison. Here again the historiographical challenge has been to negotiate between the two strands around which scholarship on provincial inter-communal relationships in the 1930s and 1940s have been structured—on the one, that communal interactions were shaped by specific events in those decades and that they were drastically different from how things had been previously, and, on the other, assertions that there had long existed a civilisational divide between local Hindu and Muslim communities.
The work of Papiya Ghosh still represents the most earnest and comprehensive existing attempt to study the complexity of the politics of late colonial Bihar against the backdrop of the wider political context. Firstly, she offerss a more nuanced picture of the Muslim community in the province and shows that there existed considerable heterogeneity in terms of public opinion within it. Secondly, she points to the strengthening and polarisation of ties of community and their centrality in matters of politics. And, thirdly, she identifies the role of both the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress in perpetuating certain stereotypes about those who belonged to the other or supported the ideology espoused by the other organisation.Footnote 51 For Ghosh, the polarisation of the political factions in Bihar, especially after the formation of the Congress Ministry in 1937, was increasingly stretched along communal lines, and most issues that were talked about somehow became aligned to the question of religious identity even as identity and the loyalties that accompanied this were shown to be complex and not always dictated by religion. Ghosh's work places the blame for the growing alienation of Muslims and their antagonistic attitude towards the Congress Ministry on the propaganda of both the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha. At the same time, she also points out that the Congress's counter attack was mostly directed at the Muslim League. This was so, Ghosh contends, because the Congress was always uncomfortable with, if not in complete denial of, the overlap between itself and the Hindu Mahasabha.Footnote 52
The arguments in Ghosh's scholarship, however, are to a large extent based on the premise that the late colonial period was a period of rupture, wherein relationships between communities were being fundamentally renegotiated and that these renegotiations were imposed on ordinary people in a top-down manner via the rhetoric of identity-based politics. This hypothesis again places the emphasis on a disconnect between ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ times as well as on the passiveness of ‘people’ who supposedly act in the ways they do only because their political or community leaders have instructed them accordingly. As Ghosh very skillfully demonstrates, this means that religious communities cannot be bracketed en masse for always possessing and aspiring for the same interests, and that space always exists for the existence of different political standpoints. But it is also important to consider the extent to which such differences are constructed, whether what people in general believe finds representation in the articulations of those who lead them, or whether what the latter profess percolates down to the masses and in time is assumed to become the dominant voice.
It is with such questions in mind that the remainder of this article now turns to exploring communal violence in Bihar around the time of Partition. It seeks to understand this phenomenon through the lens of ‘routine violence’ and the processes through which the dichotomy between ‘routine’ and ‘extraordinary’ violence is established. As discussed above, Pandey refers to the pervasiveness of ‘routine violence’ in contemporary Indian society in postcolonial times in the form of familiar symbols, the language that is regularly employed to talk about difference, and the narratives of the past that gain legitimacy as the official account of what happened. However, in what follows, I shall argue that the concept of ‘routine violence’ can be useful in understanding the agency that people employ in the violence of ‘extraordinary’ times, allowing us to look beyond the rationale of its being inexplicable. At the same time, there are limitations involved, namely that the historical record makes it difficult to find ordinary voices within the archive through which to settle the question of agency. The constant juxtaposition of the ‘normalcy’ of everyday life with the sheer enormity of the scale of extraordinary violence leads to the normalisation of structures, causes and symbols that might be embedded in long-established patterns of prejudice. It is this dual limitation and insight palpable in the nature of the 1946 communal rioting in Bihar that this article will also highlight.
Hannah Arendt's 1963 observation on the trial of Adolf Eichmann (the Nazi official responsible for organising the transport of Jews to concentration camps)—and subtitled A report on the banality of evil Footnote 53—became a theoretical concept that has influenced many others when exploring instances of collective violence such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, war and terrorism. Historians such as Christopher Browning, in his work on the German reserve police battalion's role in the genocide of Jews from Polish villages, has argued that the its members (who committed barbarous acts of violence) cannot have existed outside of the ‘normal’ circumstances of what was considered everyday life in Germany; rather, they were ‘ordinary men’ who were very much a part of it.Footnote 54 Since the 1990s a growing literature based on the nature of group violence in other contexts has similarly asserted the need to deconstruct the binary between the ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’.Footnote 55 For David Moshman, for instance, one way to understand group violence is to scrutinise it through what he calls “identity processes” involving:
(a) A dichotomisation of identities into ‘us’ and ‘them’, (b) dehumanisation to place ‘them’ outside of the realm of moral obligation and (c) denial to preserve moral self-conceptions.Footnote 56
These three identity processes highlighted by Moshman, are clearly visible in various discourses relating to how communal violence in Bihar was structured and produced in 1946. Hence, I first explore the dichotomisation of identities—as Hindus and Muslims—that took place there. I then turn to the process of dehumanisation that occurs during instances of collective violence by showing how perpetrators of violence came to be seen as part of a ‘faceless mob’ perceived to be from ‘outside’ of the realm of normalcy. And lastly, I address the question of denial regarding what might have ‘caused’ the breakdown of everyday patterns of community behaviour through an analysis of how the riot there was talked about in terms of being a ‘madness’ that engulfed and destroyed relationships. Indeed, all three identity processes and the way in which they manifest themselves in the archival record relating to Bihar, I would argue, present useful insights into the workings of the ways in which the binary between ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’ is created.
The riots of 1946 in Bihar
Dichotomisation
The riots of 1946—‘the Great Bihar Killings’ as they are sometimes labelled in the archival record—were a reaction to violence that had incinerated Calcutta and Noakhali in Bengal earlier in the same year, when 16 August was declared by the Muslim League as the Direct Action Day upon which to assert its demand for a separate Muslim homeland. The Calcutta riots—also known as ‘The Week of the Long Knives’—initially targeted Hindus. However, in the week-long carnage people from both communities suffered immense loss of life and property. The violence in Noakhali, which took place primarily in October 1946, has also been interpreted as a response to the Calcutta Killings, and included the forcible conversion of many Hindu residents of the district to Islam. This, Rakesh Babtyal argues, is what made the riots truly unique and unprecedented as “religion not only constituted the identity of a particular community which was attacked violently but religion itself was attacked”.Footnote 57 Even as the case is made for the distinct nature of the Noakhali riots, Babtyal simultaneously links the particular nature of this violence to the long standing influence of Wahabi and Faraizi revivalist movements on the psyche of local Muslims.Footnote 58 Hence, the exceptionalism of the violence lay not in the disjunction that it presented with its own communal history but in the ways in which it differed in manifestation from the other instances of comparable ‘extraordinary’ violence taking place elsewhere in India at the time. Suranjan Das, in his pioneering work on communal violence in colonial and post-colonial Bengal, argues over several articles and monographs that the riots in Calcutta in 1946 were fundamentally different in character from the communal violence that the province had seen in previous decades on account of being very meticulously planned and orchestrated. In contrast, previous instances of communal rioting, according to Sen, were largely spontaneous and motivated by fractions and tensions in which class played a major role.Footnote 59 However, Das's theoretisation of communal violence has been critiqued for placing too much emphasis on the act of rioting and thereby solidifying an arguably simplistic equivalency between communalism and riots. In this sense—for Das—riots, as moments of extraordinary violence, offer the lens through which to understand communal strife, while leaving aside crucial questions such as: “What are the world views that give rise to such violence? What are the other conflicts that build up in the interregnum between riots?”Footnote 60
Rioting in Bihar started in November 1946 mostly in the areas surrounding the district of Patna. Sir Hugh Dow, the Governor of Bihar, in his report to the Viceroy Wavell, summed up the situation in the province as follows:
This is my appreciation of communal situation up to Nov. 8th. The relations between Hindu and Moslem communities in Bihar began to deteriorate shortly after ‘direct action’ resolution of the Moslem League at the end of July. They became still worse with the Calcutta riots and subsequent communal disorders in East Bengal … [I]n Bihar the rural Moslem population is comparatively small and isolated groups have been the objects of most determined attacks. Roving Hindu mobs have sought to exterminate the Moslem population … Almost all casualties have been Moslems and it is estimated that of these 75% have been women and children. Only in a few cases have Moslem victims received help from their Hindu neighbours who have exhibited callous indifference to suffering.Footnote 61
In Dow's statement, two important points emerge. First is the question of ‘cause’ while the second is that of ‘response’. The incidents of rioting in the province, as viewed by a colonial administration, were primarily a reaction to violence taking place elsewhere. This suggests a certain externalisation of the cause of the communal clash in question. Its emphasis on the impetus coming from ‘outside’, and the breakdown in the law and order situation being attributable to a frenzy created by rumours concerning the atrocities that had been unleashed on the Hindus of Bengal, reinforces the binary of ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’ times. The potential for the breakdown of the regular ties of community did not essentially exist. Instead a situation was ‘created’ wherein existing ties could not hold. This brings us to the point about ‘response’. In the statement quoted above, the province is presented as being a state of intense polarisation; allegedly the entire Hindu community was baying for the blood of Muslims, whose response to violence was either unanimous anger and outrage or indifference to what might be happening to people who had inhabited the same social space as them for several generations. Hence, while the question of ‘causes’ places this communal violence as ‘extraordinary’ in so far as its origin was concerned, the comment on ‘response’ indicates a more-deep seated, long-standing prejudice that intensified around the time of the riots.
Interestingly, much of the rhetoric produced by the Muslim League regarding the origin, course and response to the rioting in Bihar, while pitched somewhat differently, can be interpreted as embedded in a similar binary of ‘routine’ and ‘extraordinary’ violence. This is reflected in a pamphlet published by prominent League members from Bihar and Bengal, as well as All-India leaders, which dismissed the assertion that the 1946 riots in Bihar were primarily a reaction to the communal violence in Bengal. Instead, they placed the blame on an alleged long-planned ‘conspiracy’ on the part of Bihar's Congress Ministry:
Attempts have been made to connect the Bihar massacres with the desire to take revenge for the Noakhali happenings. It is undoubtedly true that grossly exaggerated reports of Noakhali provided a convenient argument to the inciters and had perhaps something to do with the timing and the severity of the outbreak, but there is no doubt that the plans had been well-laid and the powder all but ignited weeks before Noakhali. This is decisively proved by the savage butchery at Beniabad on the 29th of September, and the killing at Adhana in July, weeks before the Calcutta riots which began on August 16th.Footnote 62
Here, while the argument for the immediacy and (to some extent) novelty of the communal tension was dismissed by the claim that it was a well-thought out agenda, at the same time the nature of the violence was described as incitement from above of a gullible, easily-galvanised mass of people who ultimately possessed no control over their actions. The pamphlet further talked about continuities between the riots and the communal history of the province and the long-standing rift between the two communities that was as much of a class divide as it was a religious one:
The incitement of the Bihar Leaders fell on fertile soil because the Bihar Hindus are peculiarly susceptible to communal frenzy, and have time and again attacked and butchered isolated settlements of Muslims, whenever they have felt that the might of British rule is shaken or that power has effectively come into the hands of Hindus. A whole succession of violent outbreaks and communal massacres, in 1917, between 1937–1939 during the first Congress regime, and again since 1946 bears witness to this …On the present occasion the Hindu masses were easily persuaded that they were masters of their land and could work their will in Muslims with impunity … Footnote 63
The pamphlet's language strongly rejected the idea that communal tension in the province was a recent phenomenon. At the same time, it also pointed out that the current spate of violence fell within an established pattern that dictated the nature of interactions between local Hindus and Muslims. The weakening of the colonial hold over the subcontinent was perceived, in the excerpt quoted above, as an opportunity for strengthening Hindu dominance. Therefore, according to the pamphlet, the prospect of freedom from British rule, if it was accompanied by the substitute of ‘Hindu rule’, was detrimental to the interests of the Muslim community as a whole, and it was this essential ‘clash of collective interests’ that created tension in an otherwise uncomfortable but largely passive co-existence. This stance was also reflected in the pamphlet's discussion about the nature of age-old communal relationships in the province. In effect, it created an image of Muslims as an oppressed but brave community that had “lived as small minorities amidst overwhelming Hindu populations and … held their own in the frequent but isolated communal disturbances”.Footnote 64 Hindus, on the other hand, were depicted as a traditionally timid community that could assert its power over Muslims only thanks to its constituting a numerical majority. Hence, while in the past, the balance of power between the two communities, even if skewed, had been stable, it had now tipped completely in favour of Hindus thanks to the Congress having gained power in the province:
… the open partiality of the Governmental machine, now come into the communal hands of the Hindu Congress, has introduced a fatal factor in the political situation, much removed from the firm and impartial handling of the criminals of the 1917 disturbances. This has afforded an assurance of impunity to the Hindu masses whilst the Muslims are left helpless victims of an arrogant and inflamed majority.Footnote 65
The idea that a loosely-held balance is disrupted by an external factor—in this case, the policies and politics of the Congress—articulated the League's need to create a contrast between the conditions in which riots occur and those under which they do not. Its propaganda machine worked actively to propagate this picture of the premediated and orchestrated nature of the communal situation in the province. Another pamphlet, The Bihar State Killing, placed the blame emphatically on the Congress adminstration:
Undoubtedly this is the greatest massacre in peace time in the dated history of the world. Considering all the facts and evidence the Working Committee is fully convinced that this great killing of the Mussalmans of Bihar was deliberately planned and well-organised by the Hindu leadership under the guidance of the Congress Hindu Government of Bihar. The war of total annihilation of the fourteen (14) per cent Muslim minority … is unprecedented and inhuman barbarities committed are unparalleled in history.Footnote 66
Apart from repeated accusations that the Congress Ministry had had a central hand in stoking communal fires, the pamphlet consistently used words and phrases such as ‘unprecedented’, ‘unparalleled’ and ‘greatest massacre in history’ to describe what had just happened in the province. Furthermore, the riots were described as genocide, and deemed greater than “cruelties committed by the Huns [sic], the Germans and the Japanese in the War”.Footnote 67 Clearly, this was an attempt to communicate a sense of enormity and scale that would qualify the violence as ‘extraordinary’ and thereby create a contrast with what might have been the ‘normal’ character of interactions and relationships between the two communities in the province.Footnote 68
This process of dichotomisation of a social milieu into ‘us’ and ‘them’ is also visible in the way in which the pamphlets assigned blame for the riots. In the main, it was not the activities of organisations such as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or the Hindu Mahasabha that were blamed for the escalating communal tension in the region; rather it was the Congress and its administraion that were collectively branded as the body pursuing an essentially communal agenda targeting minority communities. In accusing the Congress (which claimed to represent all sections of Indian society) of being a party with strong Hindu biases, the Muslim League sought an equal footing as the organisation that spoke for the shared grievances of Bihar's Muslims; in the process, however, it was also underlining that its agenda did not only include mobilising support for the Pakistan movement. Accordingly, the pamphlet referred to Muslims within the Congress or those who supported it ideologically as being equally alienated as those outside it. The tussle, it stressed, was not one based on ideology but was a more civilisational struggle with religious identity the parameter for acceptance or rejection:
The extermination was to be of the Muslims because they were Muslims and not because they subscribed to a particular view about the future destiny of the Indian sub-continent. Maulvi Mohammad Shafi, a noted Congress Muslim worker, and high in the hierarchy of that organisation, was butchered, when he, confident in the security of his political affiliations, had gone to intercede with the frenzied mob. He had told then all Muslims in Beniabad believed in the Congress Ideology and had voted Congress. The contemptuous reply was, “If you are a Muslim that is enough for us”.Footnote 69
Dehumanisation and Denial
As stated above, the twin processes of ‘dehumanisation’ and of ‘denial’ are inevitably interlinked and may occur simultaneously. In the case of Bihar, the simultaneous dehumanisation of the perpetrator alongside denial that riots there marked a complete breakdown of community ties is reflected in the archival record, in particular in the seemingly careful documentation of the cases of protection provided to by one community's members to those of the other community.
The accounts and correspondence of the contemporary colonial administration represent the most accessible source for gaining an insight into these simultaneous processes (as reflected in the way the scale, impact and response to the violence witnessed during the 1946 riots is discussed). Indeed, the general sense of distance and aloofness with which the fortnightly reports to the Viceroy review the communal situation in Bihar is indicative of both the denial and dehumanisation of collective violence. These reports come across as a ‘detached’ account of what the officials believed was happening in the province. Awareness of the imminent end of British rule in the subcontinent and thus of a marked decline in its stake in controlling communal turmoil, coupled with condescension regarding the ability of a government helmed by Indians to handle effectively large-scale breakdown of law and order, is evident in their language. Take, for example, an October report from Dow to Wavell that provides estimates of the number of casualties incurred during the riots and the manner in which the authorities dealt with the violence:
Given an honest intention of finding out real facts, the problem of arriving at a true figure would be difficult enough, but with the ministry and almost every Hindu official or non-official trying to scale the figure down and the Muslim League and most Muslims trying to inflate it, the actual number of casualties will never be known with any great accuracy … The extent to which some victims will go in exaggerating their misfortunes is almost incredible: there has been one instance in which the wife, mother and father of a refugee turned up while he was in the middle of a tale in which he asserted that they had been slaughtered before his eyes.Footnote 70
The tone of the correspondence is almost one of amused indifference wherein the breakdown of law and order situation and the casualties resulting from it is presented as being inflated thanks to the vested interests of those involved and also a reflection of the bad governance of the Congress Ministry. Dow further writes about provincial ministry's handling of the whole situation and the British administration's role in it:
In Bihar, with 40 million of population, with half the industrial development of India, with the least qualified ministries to deal with the close repercussions of all India politics … The result is that we are tied to very low standards of administration … Since the outbreak of these troubles I have asked my Prime Minister that he must get out a statement that the Bihar Government are going to give grants for the rebuilding of Muslim houses that have been burnt in the riots … he is dreadfully afraid of doing more for the Muslims of Bihar than the Bengal Government has done for Hindu victims and so laying himself open to the criticism of extremist Hindus when the Assembly opens.Footnote 71
The structure of the administrative machinery that British colonial rule had erected across the subcontinent was based on the premise that its primary purpose was to facilitate and consolidate its hold over local populations through a system of law, order and justice that resembled what Britain had back home. With time, it had become increasingly necessary to involve Indians in the administration through their employment in the various services of the government such as the army, the judiciary and the police. However, most often those employed in these services were required to act as bulwarks of protection against moments of resistance from those whom they governed. The end of empire in the biggest and most important British colony was evidently approaching as the level of participation and representation that Indians came to enjoy in central and provincial governance had increased considerably. This had led to a much diminished incentive for the colonial administration to hold on to the control that it exercised over those under their employ, and resulted in them acting more as cynical observers of the unfolding crisis.
Discussions over the charged communal situation in Bihar in the fortnightly reports often referenced the colonial history of the places where the riots were most severe. In them, past instances of tussles between Hindus and Muslims were reported as being, “not uncommon but fairly isolated”, and the escalation of the communal strife in the late 1930s and the 1940s was attributed to the increased activity of primarily the Muslim League and propaganda that was fed to the public through press outfits regulated or influenced by both it and the Hindu Mahasabha. The frequent use of words such as ‘holocaust’, ‘pogrom’ and ‘massacre’ (which was reproduced in the propaganda language of the League) also indicate the projected novelty of what had happened as opposed to the more ‘regular’ established communal situation in the province. In addition, reports about the causes of the recent communal trouble often emphasised that culprits were always those who belonged to the lower classes within both communities while people with a higher social status were seen as giving protection to each other:
High class people generally did not take part … and there were innumerable incidents where Bhabhan and Rajputs not only gave protection to the Muslims but actually came out to fight the mobs in order to protect Muslim lives and property. Goalas, Kurmis, Dusadha, Beldars and Musahars had taken most prominent part in riots. Even in committing ordinary dacoities Dusadhs, Beldars and Musahars become very violent.Footnote 72
In demarcating those who participated in the violence as belonging to the lower, uneducated sections of local society, the implicit assumption was that the breakdown of community ties did not run deep because only those who had ‘other’ motives for partaking in the violence or who did not know any better could be provoked to action while those who possessed ‘good sense’ that came from either economic security or cultural capital could see through the machinations of vested interests and defy the exhortations of propaganda. This assigning of different roles to people belonging to different social strata within a situation of communal strife was again symptomatic of the need to deny that violence was indeed a defining element of the interactions between communities that could cut across class ties. This is turn reinstated the binary between ‘routine’ and ‘extraordinary’ violence, where the former is projected as merely an extension of the inherent criminality that exists among those inhabiting a society's margins. And the so-called upper class remains either detached or un-swayed by rhetoric in times of communal strife, just as it does in more ‘ordinary’ times. Such intersection between class and communal divide in the context of the 1946 Bihar riots has been discussed by Vinita Damodaran and is described by her to be more complex that what had been at play in the communal riots in Bengal earlier that same year:
While in Bengal the communal upheavals in 1946 can be explained … in terms of the class divide between Hindus and Muslims, in Bihar the situation was more complex. In Bihar there is no evidence to suggest that in any of the villages where communal rioting was at its height that Hindus and Muslims fell into two distinct class categories. Though there is evidence that in many villages … low caste Goalas, Kurmis and Dusadhs attacked their equally deprived Muslim neighbours … Here sectarian conflict actually coexisted with class conflict…Footnote 73
Configurations of class and communal conflict, which seem to have swept across the Bihar countryside in 1946, are—for Damodaran—quite curious and defy the pattern of sectarian strife in other provinces as well as in Bihar itself at other times. While she does see the rioting to be sudden and unprecedented in its nature and scale, what is significant is the challenge to the explanation that the cause behind its eruption is beyond explanation. Moreover, the centrality of the impact of elite manipulation and propaganda on fomenting communal tension is rejected as being too simplistic. Instead, what is argued is that any sort of deeper insight into the communal situation that developed in Bihar in 1946 cannot be gained by looking at this moment in isolation from the nature of inter-communal relationships that had previously existed in the province.Footnote 74
Yet discussions that emerge out of the archive, about the circumstances that created instances of ‘extraordinary’ violence, more often than not present a scenario wherein an essentially top-down mechanism facilitated the agitation of the masses. For this reason, the role of press and other print media, as seen by the colonial administration, was instrumental in the unprecedented levels of violence witnessed during the riots. Another of Dow's fortnightly reports states as much:
The tension between the leaders of the two communities and its dissemination in the public press continues to be the most explosive element in the situation. It is pretty clear to all that the immediate cause of the outbreak in Bihar was the great meetings held in Patna on the 25th and 26th of October to celebrate “Noakhali Day”. My Prime Minister cannot be expected to see this and sees red at any such suggestion … A heavy responsibility lies on the “Statesman” for its heavily exaggerated reports about the slaughter in Noakhali. Naturally the Bihar newspapers exaggerate these still further …The other Patna Daily, “The Indian Nation”, has been even worse. It is practically the organ of the Mahasabha … has been particularly virulent about the Muslims.Footnote 75
Accompanying the idea that communal turmoil was a product of polarisation created through elite propaganda, was the notion that the actual perpetrators of violence were members of a faceless mob, inherently given to causing trouble and comprised of social malcontents described as goondas, dacoits and outsiders.Footnote 76 This distancing of the ‘mob’, which operated without rationale or agency in its pursuit of violence and that was consequently symbolic of the ‘extraordinariness’ of this violence when compared with the regular patterns of community life in the province, was reflected in a compilation of statements from Hindus who provided protection to their Muslim neighbours during the riots. This report, prepared by sub-divisional officers stationed in several villages of the province, presented a picture of Hindus sheltering their Muslim friends and neighbours from “blood thirsty mobs of their co-religionists at great personal risk”.Footnote 77 An analysis of the individual statements and the narratives of the riots that emerge from these statements presents a picture wherein the ‘mob’ is always an external entity that disrupts otherwise harmonious communal relationships in the villages that the report mentions.Footnote 78 The magnitude and brutality of violence is talked about as being an aberration that had to be a deviation from the norm:
Even a Gurkha constable whom I met at Hilsa on the evening of the 5th November, 1946, told me that what he had seen of the carnage at some of the places had made him sick … We must admit and face the brutal fact that the atrocities committed during these disturbances mark a regression from ordinary human standards which was difficult even to imagine.Footnote 79
The suggestion that the capacity of the mob for violence links to it not really belonging to the social milieu that it attacks is, of course, a highly problematic one, and is reflective of both the processes of dehumanisation as well of denial that go into the construction of the ‘extraordinary’ violence narrative. A more nuanced understanding of collective violence instead calls for it to “be recognised that crowds are not built out of passive pools of people”,Footnote 80 and that “networks of people and relationships that already exist have to be mobilised in the creation of crowds”.Footnote 81 That those who comprise the mob can in fact be the same people who might have been neighbours and friends of those under attack, is reflected in the following account by Bashir Ahmad, a riot victim from Chappra, of his persecution by those with whom he had lived all his life:
I beg respectfully to inform you briefly the miserable plight in which I have been placed … all my friends were Hindus and they often used to say that I was more a Hindu than a Moslem. I universally took part in all ceremonies held at the house of my Hindu friends both social and religious. When the town was seething with communal feelings I had not the slightest apprehension … to my great surprise the morning of the 26th of October a large crowd from my mahalla attacked my house, set fire to it looted my property … and I had to fly for my life … After a few days of my leaving my own house I was prevailed upon some friends to go back to my house but before I went there I was threatened by my mahalla people when they learnt of my intended return to my house with dire consequences if I ever thought of returning.Footnote 82
It is significant that Ahmad's account begins with a description of the nature of the relationships that he shared with Hindu friends and neighbours in his village, and also that he did not expect trouble even as the province reeled under the impact of communal riots. And yet the fact that he was nonetheless attacked and that the same friends and neighbours did not want him to return to his home problematises the assumption that the mob is always an unknown alien entity outside of existing communal equations within a social setting.
Another report concerning the immediate cause of the riots in the most affected districts of the province—Chapra, Patna, Gaya and Monghyr—observed that the disturbances were triggered, in most cases, by incidents or actions that would not have been thought of as having the potential for inciting communal passions to the levels they did in the summer of 1946. In Chapra, the start of trouble was the harassment of some local Muslims by League workers for refusing to close their shops or miss school on “Direct Action Day”.Footnote 83 Further trouble arose when Hindus “obstructed Mohammadans from using Sirhiaghat as they claimed the ghat was constructed by a Hindu and there was a Hindu temple and that they would not allow the Muslims to use it”.Footnote 84 Processions taken out by Hindus on Durga Puja and Mahabiri on 13 October 1946 became a major cause for tension on account of slogans such as “Pakistan Murdabad” and “Jinnah Murdabad” being raised. Another procession for the goddess Laxmi that had, for several years, been a very minor event passing without much attention, was now attended by nearly 2000 Hindus primarily as a show of strength to intimidate local Muslims. In the district of Patna “the communal riot took place over a Hindu woman in village Andhana, Biharsharif”,Footnote 85 and the spread of different versions of this news to neighboring villages strained inter-communal relations. It translated into conflict that took different forms, such as when Muslims of Syed Barhi raised objections to the construction of Devi Asthan Chabutra (a place for the goddess in the form of a platform). In another significant incident, a Hindu-Muslim clash took place over permission to hoist the Congress and the Muslim League flags in their school. In Gaya District, the Jehanabad subdivision was the most severely-affected area and here, as the report pointed out, the immediate cause of trouble was three Muslim women from the village of Thali being robbed, after which the communal situation worsened. The report also suggested that the fact that Jehanabad, the most disturbed subdivision, was the area where the notorious dacoit Mathura Singh operated could be more than a mere coincidence. However it is pointed out that “with the exception of the details mentioned above [the] district had no communal history during the months previous to the outbreak of the actual riots”.Footnote 86 Bhagalpore saw black flag demonstrations by the League and the observance of black Diwali by Hindus, while in Monghyr the origin of communal tension was identified as a school play on the occasion of the Saraswati Puja, whose content was deemed offensive by Muslim students of the school.
In all these incidents, the implicit emphasis was that in other circumstances—in a different time—the same occurrences would not in themselves have had the potential to spark the trouble that they did in 1946. After all, religious processions, inter-communal marriages, the tense atmosphere around religious festivals, the implicit political intent and ideological content of creative endeavours such as plays, songs, novels and so on, had in the past been a part of everyday life in the province. The fact that it was only now that these were deemed capable of inciting communal passions to dangerous levels reflected the ease with which the rupture between routine and extraordinary violence can take place. At the same time we might question why this disjuncture should be made the lens through which to analyse communal violence, particularly when the seeds of extraordinary violence remained embedded in the language and structures of routine violence that already existed in (and was encountered on a daily basis) the lives of communities that it affected.Footnote 87
Apart from what we learn from scrutinising the language used in archival records dealing with the Bihar riots, how ‘extraordinary’ violence is remembered by individuals has also helped to strengthen this binary.Footnote 88 For instance, in an interview with Mangal Dubey, a Hindu resident of Bihar, who remembered first-hand both the riots in West Bengal and those that followed in his own province, described the latter as follows:
Even though communal riots were not something that was alien to the region, never before had the Province witnessed such macabre scenes of violence. It appeared as if the angry mobs were hungry for the blood of Muslims. Every Muslim killed seemed to have become a cause for celebration – the fulfillment of a spiritual duty.Footnote 89
What is significant about Dubey's particular remembrance of the riots is that it again posits the magnitude of the 1946 communal violence against the backdrop that (as is acknowledged) is not free of it in the past. The memory of what is described as ‘unprecedented’ violence carries within itself a forgetting or at least a subconscious downplaying of the precedents that did exist. At another point in the conversation, the interviewee compared the violence of the Calcutta Killings—in which he found himself stranded—with what then happened in Bihar.
I remember in such detail how things unfolded in Calcutta. I can till date remember the clashing cries of Allah-ho- Akbar and har har Mahadev piercing the night. But I was not surprised. Calcutta had a Muslim League government at the time and communal trouble was always a problem. But Bihar is a bigger puzzle. I had so many close Muslim friends. I don't know what happened.Footnote 90
The juxtaposition of the nature of violence as it unfolded in Bengal as something that though immensely brutal was nonetheless expected, with bewilderment regarding course of events in Bihar is telling. At some level, there is a process of denial that aims at coming to terms with the violence as being uncharacteristic of what the interviewer believed was the nature of communal relationships in his province. A similar sense of denial feeding into the narrative of ‘extraordinary’ violence is implicit in the celebrated Urdu litterateur and academic Kalim Aajiz's memoire Zahan Khushboo Hi Khushboo Thi. In it, the author talks at length about his memories of living through the 1946 riots in which he lost his mother and sister, who were at that time residing in his native village Telhara where almost the entire Muslim population was wiped out in the communal frenzy. It is evident in the language of this text that even after having suffered such loss, the author keeps returning to the acts of kindness and compassion shown to him by a few Hindus who tried to help him to get to Telhara from Patna. It is perhaps the selective remembering of these instances that allow Aajiz to hold on precariously to personal convictions about the nature of intercommunal relationships in the province. Arguably this was his way of dealing with and ‘forgetting’ the horror of his family being murdered in the place where he had grown up in and where he thought that they could come to no harm.Footnote 91
Propaganda, in addition, plays a considerable part in solidifying such remembrances and the ways in which violence is forgotten. Much of how an event is remembered is conditioned by the knowledge that an individual consumes about it. Incendiary pamphlets and grossly-exaggerated reports of casualties produced on both sides fuelled insecurities, strengthened prejudices and spread rumours that worsened an already bad situation. To illustrate the inflammable material that was being printed daily in Bihar's newspapers, Dow provided the following provocative extract that appeared in Searchlight on 23 October 1946:
East Bengal is a challenge to India's manhood. We are sure that the country is not yet so utterly dead to elementary sense of honour so as remain a silent on-looker for barbarism that has few parallels in history … Neither honour nor religion is safe at the hands of the miscreants who are free to roam at large. Putting defenseless men and women to fire and sword, and compelling them to choose between life and Islam … The situation involves the honour of women and the sacredness of religion … every resource economical and otherwise, must be forthwith organised to instill the fear of God into men who have the impudence to think they can impose their dictation by force. If there must be civil war, let there be one.Footnote 92
What such propaganda is able to achieve is to engage a target audience in an orchestrated blame game, wherein those who participate are collectively dehumanised as the ‘mob’ while those who suffer become the ‘victims’; and agency is exercised entirely from above in a fashion that has been described by Paul Brass as an “institutionalised riot system”. What this implies is that the transformation of a precipitating event into a full-scale communal riot is a process in which the agency of how events unfold is removed from the actual participants of the riot. Instead, it is steered by a combination of factors that form the causal links of the riot: politicians with an interest in fomenting violence, an “institutionalised riot system” that aids them in the actual orchestration of violence, a powerful and compelling discourse of communalism operating primarily through propaganda, and, finally, an administration that is irresolute or incompetent when it comes to preventing violence.Footnote 93 Such intent was captured in another pamphlet published in 1946, entitled Kya Bihar Kaand ke liye Hindu Zimmedar Hain? (Are the Hindus Responsible for the Happenings in Bihar?), which attempted to deflect and allocate blame for the 1946 violence:
The Hindus ask what has happened in Bihar that warrants such hue and cry? It is not even one percent of the atrocities perpetrated by the Muslim League in West Bengal on the Hindus. The reason behind this is the fact that whereas the Provincial Government in Bengal was completely supportive of the activities of the trouble makers in West Bengal, the Congress government in Bihar left no stone unturned in repressing, arresting and firing upon the Hindus.Footnote 94
All the same, the pamphlet stressed that even the province's Muslims were mere pawns in a game being masterminded by the League.Footnote 95 While presenting a defensive Hindu position, it offers us an important example of how the language of propaganda removes all agency from those who are actually killing or being killed and places it instead in the hands of those who from a position of power are either ‘defending’ or ‘obstructing’ or ‘inciting’ the so-called ‘pawns’.
Conclusion
In much of the scholarship on the nature of communal violence in India, there has been a discernable, almost a three-way, analytical disjunction.Footnote 96 There are studies that explore communalism and communal violence in colonial India, those that seek to understand the structure and mechanics of the same in post-colonial India, and then those that focus on Partition and the violence marked it. And even though Partition-related violence is often a point of reference for works on communal violence in the colonial and the postcolonial period, the overwhelming tendency has been to regard it as something that intimately informs the period before and after 1947 and yet is fundamentally different from both at the same time. Common to examinations of violence in colonial and postcolonial India are enquiries about the role of the state and its relationship with and/or response to communal strife. Even though the colonial state presented itself as an indifferent spectator to the unfolding violence of the time, Partition has tended to find its way into the archives and the memories of people as an ‘extraordinary’ time, which contrasted sharply with the ‘normalcy’ of what preceded and followed it.
In Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992—his hugely important contribution to scholarship emerging from the Subaltern School of South Asian history writing—Shahid Amin refers to the hegemony of what he calls “master narratives” in the context of the violent incident that became the reason for Gandhi to decide to halt the Non-Cooperation Movement in 1922.Footnote 97 According to Amin, the place that this incident came to occupy in subsequent nationalist accounts of the freedom struggle was that of an aberration as well as a triumph of the resolve of the non-violent spirit of the national movement from which lessons then needed to be drawn. And yet the event in itself was not important. Asking questions such as how it unfolded, why it happened and who were the actors involved would have entailed too much questioning of the assumptions on which the master narrative (nationalist in this case) was built. And so, as this article has explored through its exploration of the 1946 communal violence in Bihar, a similar discomfort exists in relation to explaining Partition-related violence, which all too often is manifested in the construction of the binary between ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’. The argument presented here is that the discourse of extraordinary violence is created by those who control and condition the content of master narratives, and is reflected both in the archival record and in personal memory in the form of three key identity-forming processes, namely dichotomisation, dehumanisation and denial.
