SOCIAL SCIENCE PROBING (March 1990 – December 1991)
Book Review
Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, Gyanendra Pandey, Delhi, oxford university Press, 1992, pp297, Price: Rs 100.10
COLONIAL CONSTRUCTION OF INDIAN PAST AND
COMMUNALISM IN INDIA
Ish Mishra
The present epoch of Indian history is marked by
its ‘decolonization’ through World Bank-IMF sponsored ‘developmental’ economic
policies of ‘liberalization- privatization-globalization’ on the one hand and
rising tides of communalism on the other. The communal historiography ,
claiming ‘hinduttva’ to be synonymous with nationalism, has accelerated
its attempts to reconstruct the Indian past based on
myths, superstitions and beliefs, more particularly after the
RSS-VHP-BJP network ‘corrected’ a 16th century historical ‘wrong ‘by
demolishing Babari Masjid at Ajodhya on December 6, last year. When there is
distortion of history, it has to be corrected, for it percolates down the
popular perceptions of history and feeds communal emotions. Whereas communalism
has been one of the central points of academic debate taking place in India,
its history remains inadequately researched and analyses. The book under
review, which according to its author, seeks to ‘’examine the conditions, the
character and the consequences of what has been called ‘communal’ conflict in
19 the and early 20 the century India’’ provides deep insight into the genesis
and evolution of the problem of communalism through an examination of the
discourse that gave it meaning
One of the most intellectually debilitating absurd assumptions accepted
by most Indians
Is that
anything involving people of two different’ religious communities’
automatically falls under the heading ‘communal relations’. That is why we have
leaders and Muslim (or Sikh) leaders, intellectuals and Muslim intellectuals
and so on. Political parties, while choosing their electoral candidates, make
caste\communal consideration as one of the bases of their power arithmetic.
Argument by definition and tautology there by replaces argument by analysis.
Gyanendra Pandey’s construction of Communalism in Colonial North India question
some of these assumption and examines the genesis and evolution of the concept
in its historical context.
Communalism is not an
element of human biology; nor is it even an idea that can plausibly be imagined
to live an eternal life of its own. Communalism is not an idea but an ideology.
It came into existence at a discernible historical moment for rationally
understandable historical reasons and it’s subject to change for similar
reasons. ‘Communalism’ as Gyanendra Pandey puts it, is a ‘’ a form of
colonialist knowledge. The concept stands for the puerile and primitive – all
that colonialism, in its own reckoning was not. The paradox is that the
nationalists have done more than anyone else to propagate its use (p6).
Ironically, the word ‘communal’ which should logically be a derivative from
community, in its common Indian usage, refers to ‘’ a condition of suspicion,
fear and hostility between members of different religious communities’’ As
aptly pointed out by the author, ‘communalism’ in this sense is never applied
to feudal Europe or other pre-capitalist societies where religiosity was no
narrower and strife between members of different religious persuasions not
rare’’.
Though the present
work does not explain the socio-economic and political factors responsible for
acceptance of this ‘colonialist knowledge’ as an ideology at societal level, it
underlines acceptance of the colonial
agenda and paradigm by nationalist as well as Marxist historians.
Prior to its
colonization by British, political fragmentation and cultural and religious
plurality co-existed. United by the Indian sub continental civilizational value
Waves j of invasions and migrations added to its pluralities and of course of
time were assimilated into the millennia- old civilization. The advent of Islam
hardly altered the civilizational characteristic except enriching its
plurality. But advent of colonialism had far-reaching effects. It destroyed the
native industries. Altered the land owning system and set on to defining the
Indian people in order to establish ideological hegemony of colonial superiority to consolidate and
continue colonial rule. And, by the end of the19thcentury, the dominant strand
in colonialist historiography was representing’’
religious bigotry and conflict between people
of different religious persuasions as
one of the more distinctive
features of Indian society past and present- a mark of the Indian section of
the ‘orient’’’ (p23). Needless to say, the aim of colonial historiography was
to establish ideological superiority of European civilizations and to deny to
the Indian people not only their present but also their past. ‘’communalism in
the colonialist perception served to designate a pathological condition. It was
like the term tribalism- which has been widely employed in writing on African
politics and history. Communalism in
India is not an age old phenomenon as colonialist and communalist sense of history would like us to believe but is ‘’
another characteristic and
paradoxical product of the age of reason
( and of capital ) which also
gave us colonialism and nationalism’’(p5).
Towards
the end of 1920s the government of India drew up and collaborate list of Hindu-
Muslim riots that had occurred I the country in the recent past’. The
author of the present work diagnoses the
events and their colonial descriptions
and explanations and nationalist
response to establish that communalism as a definitional characteristic of the Indian people was part of the colonial discourse that argued that’’ the natives
are hopelessly divided , given to
primitive passions and incapable of
managing their own affairs’’, in order
to legitimize British power. As pointed
out by Pandey , the varying accounts of ‘riots’ of 1809 in Banaras by colonial
administration and historians was aimed at establishing age – old hostility among
different religious and caste communities to fit into the structure ;’’ Evil
clashes evil. Good intervenes. Order restored’’ (p39). By then ’communal’ had
become an ‘’adjective derived not from ‘
community’ but from ‘tension between the religious communities’’. And
since the time of Nehru report. 1928, this colonial construct started making
inroads into nationalist discourse and by the mid-1930s. the nationalists were
using phrases like the ‘ communal question’ and ‘communalism’ freely to describe the problem of antagonism between
Hindus and Muslims and the politics
built up to protect their allegedly separate interest.’’ Some-
times in popular and academic usage. The term has been narrowed even further to
refer only to the Muslim and their politics (p). Unable to comprehend the
complexities of the social structure, the colonial construction of Indian
society, depending upon the changings needs of colonial rule, changed over time
and reached’’ it’s apparently fixed and ‘developed’ form only in the late 19th
century.’’ With the help of insightful examination of ‘The’ Bigoted Juana’, one
of the ‘caste- stereotypes’ constructed by the colonial historians. The author
has demonstrated how the altered needs of colonial economy brought about a
significant change in the colonial understanding of Indian society (pp66-108)
Pandey exposes the colonial historiography
and proposes ‘Community as History’ – the historical memory and accounts of the
‘little community’, an example of which is Wapeat- o-Hades at: Qasba
Mubarakpur, examined in this work (pp109-157) but does not examine the
historical development of community and custom in a particular time mad space.
Nevertheless it has been evident that such
historical construction were part of general assertion of the community and
status by different groups and classes, which, paradoxically, ‘’’’was to
transform the very sense of ‘community’ and redefine it at every level’’
(pp158-200). In response and reaction to the colonial construction, the
attempts of self-definition by Indian
leaders gave birth to several
ideologies and the anti- colonial
struggle involved mobilization of a
wider Hindu community and wider Muslim community, often to build up
nationalist feelings and associations ‘’ that went beyond the confines and concerns of religious community’’(pp201-232). It was the logic of
this early nationalist position, according to the anchor,’’ that led to the
Lucknow pact, the open espousal of separate electorate’ ’and ‘’indeed to terms
of ‘Joint’Khilafat Non – Cooperation movement.’’ thus, it is argued that the
political vision of ‘’potential unity of all Indians’’ was combined with the
social vision of ‘India’ as’Hindu’+’Muslim’+’Sikh’, etc., which speaks the limits
of the early Indian liberalism’’ that was manifestly inadequate for its own
project of building a liberal nation of free and equal citizens ‘’ (pp231-32).
The
Hindu and Muslim movements and the spate of Hindu- Muslim riots after1923 onwards, according to the
author, pointed sharply to the heightened dangers arising from community- based
mobilization. It provided sectarian organizations adopting far more extreme
position a ‘’ new importance ‘’ and led
eventually to the emergence of two-nation’ theory. With the introduction of the
mass element in the Indian politics. The participation of workers and peasants
in the nationalist activities caused reinterpretation of nationalist symbols
and slogans. It brought about’ ’a new reversal in nationalist discourse’’ that
regarded’’ communitarian mobilization ‘’ as ‘’ distorted and distorting
lendency ‘’(pp234-35). Thus, as has been analytically documented by the author,’’ the arose a new contest between two different
conceptions of nationalism – one that recognized the governess of ‘pre-existing ‘ communities which were to form the basis of new India, and another that challenged
this view of history, past and preseny.
Alongside these there developed yet another king of ‘national- ism’\’ communalism ‘ that sought to establish a hierarchy of cultures among the cultures of
India’’(pp233-60)
Therefore the present day debate over the
questions of identities and its different conceptualization and their varying
undertones and accents should be placed in its proper historical context. To
understand and counter the present aggressive upsurge of communal- ism, it is
imperative upon us to understand its historical character and ‘’ the
historical character of communalism (or
nationalism) musdt come after the historical character of the pasthas been
established. The past is historical not only in its obvious sense that the past
makes up history. It is historical also in the sense that ‘history’ itself- the
past recalled- is constructed. The modern historu of India,in this ense, was
first written in the in colonial times and by colonialists.It was
the colonialist writer who established the pattern of Indian past pretty
much as we know it today. And in that pattern, sectarian strife was an
important motif.
Even after the end of the colonial rule, the
construction of the Indian past on the
pattern of its colonial construction continus under the auspices of ‘new world
order’by communal organization who were opposed to and\ or critical of the
anti- colonial struggle,peaceful or violent’ The book under rebiew establishes the linkage
between the colonial and the communal
construction of Indian past , though
without going intdo the precolonial
state of affairs as far as religioys fanaticism and ortjodoxy is concerned. The
author suggests ‘community as history’ as the alternative to colonial
historiography but does not confront the questions related with the making
of the ‘community’ or ‘custom’ for that
matter. But them he addresses himself to the question of only one of the colonial construction-communalism.
ISH N.
MISHRA
