03-26-2005, 10:27 AM
How the commies brainwashed the east bengal hindu refugees to prevent reprisals against west bengal muslims
The following is a commie viewpoint of the hindu refugee flow from east bengal
http://www.pstc.brown.edu/chatterjee.PDF
Page 21 - 25
If this strand of elite East Bengali public discourse is implicitly dismissive of Muslims, the refugee testimonies of victimhood across class tend to be overtly anti-Muslim. In recognition of this, the Government of India instituted an investigation of âsocial tensionsâ among refugees from East Bengal in 1950 under the direction of the Anthropological Survey. The report noted âmarked tensionâ against Muslims irrespective of caste status and sex, though found it âsoftenedâ among upper castes
because of their education and stronger among women across caste because of their âidentificationâ with âtraditional ideologyâ (Guha 1959: ix). The negative stereotype of the Muslim which emerged in this study included such characteristics as cruelty, crudeness, lust, cow-killing, treachery, dirtiness and fanaticism. According to the researchers, the most significant feature about the stereotype was its ânonpolitical and nonreligious natureâ--its emphasis on what they termed the âbehavioral.â âThe political ideology of the Muslim League or features of Islam as a religion found no place in it. Though aggravated by political conflicts in recent years, the basic roots of tension lay in deeper trends of personality structure which prevented Hindus from identifying with Muslimsâ (ibid). The suggestion
is that the refugee rhetoric of victimhood constructed the East Bengali Muslim as the ontological âOtherâ of the Hindu--both superhuman in ferocity, strength and rampant sexuality, and subhuman because of dirtiness--associated with the moral pollution of beef consumption--rather than the physical, and with treachery and sexual transgression. And while I would question the analytical
relevance of âpersonality structuresâ the broader point the report made is that the opposition between Hindus and Muslims was cast in essentialized terms rather than in those of historical or local context.
This hegemonic narrative about âthe Muslim,â systematically circulated in the press, pamphlets and commemorative literature and repeated in private in story and rumour, both erased the Muslimâs docile presence in an idyllic Bengali past and demonized âhisâ15 antagonistic presence in a language of excess.
15The negative and totalizing image of the Muslim in East Bengali refugee stories is
explicitly gendered as male.
What was the immediate implication of this refugee rhetoric of prejudice and antipathy? While East Bengali refugees who sought asylum in India represented themselves as victims of Muslim communalism to claim refugee status and thereby humanitarian assistance, they found it very difficult to influence the stateâs rehabilitation intervention and experienced both relief and long-term rehabilitation policy as painfully inadequate. Large numbers of frustrated refugees took matters into their own hands and began to âresettleâ themselves by squatting on land they argued to be unoccupied and unused. The words they used were âvacant,â and the Bengali equivalent âkhaliâ as well as âpatitâ or abandoned, and âjola jamiâ which meant marshland. The impression these words conveyed was clearly that such lands were marginal and available for settlement--which was referred to as âcolonyâ construction. In some cases this land belonged to the state, but for the most part the refugees squatted on privately owned property including that belonging to local West Bengali Muslims. Particularly in the areas around the city of Calcutta, many refugee settlements were established on land âformerly inhabited by Muslim labourers and artisansâ who were âreplaced by displaced Hindus from East Pakistanâ (Bose 1968:33). Many Muslims were dispossessed of their homes in the city leading to their âghettoizationâ in a few neighbourhoods (Deb 2000:68). It could be argued that East Bengali refugee settlement across West Bengal affected the minority Muslim community most adversely. While 22 researching refugee self-settlement strategies I visited colonies on the outskirts of Calcutta as well as along the Hooghly river. It was not uncommon for me to be told while I was being shown around a colony by a refugee settler, that a soccer field or community gathering point was once a âMusalmanâ eggplant field or graveyard, or that when the East Bengalis arrived the land was âovergrown with weeds, home to jackals and mosquitos, and a handful Muslims whose homes consisted of shacksâ (Interview with Paresh Haldar, 1988). There were a few instances when I noticed the contours of a mosque or Muslim saintsâs shrine in the foundation of a refugee home. The need of the refugeesâ for new homes pitted them against local West Bengalis, but the widespread dispossession of West Bengali Muslims must be seen as a manifestation of East Bengali refugee communalism driven by as
much revenge, as a racist consciousness that marginalized or erased Muslim presence in the new refugee homeland of West Bengal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM emerged as the main political opposition to the ruling Congress regime in West Bengal after Partition, and as the âold guardâ like to tell it, party workers recognized the destabilizing force of East Bengali refugee anger against Muslims and the imperative to resettle them. This prompted the Leftâs inclusion of the refugee cause in its broader programme of redistributive justice--a move which they claimed to have âneutralizedâ refugee communalism, helped prevent large-scale violence against West Bengali Muslims and minimized the ir migration to Pakistan (Interviews with Bijoy Mazumdar, Anil Sinha, 1988-89). Gyan Pandey has argued that the history of sectarian violence âhas been treated in the historiography of modern India as aberration and absenceâ (1992: 27). In the Leftâs master narrative of successful leadership of
subaltern movements, the material or economic has been stressed as an explanation for Hindu-Muslim conflict. In this version the East Bengali refugeesâ communalism--and expropriation of Muslims--is represented as an aberration, a distortion of the normal condition of inter-community harmony., cultural syncretism and class solidarity, corrected as it were by the Left successful efforts at
consciousness raising. This erases the recent history of East Bengali communalism, and marginalizes Muslim victims. The fact that the Congress and the CPM insist on a small figure for Muslim outmigration to Pakistan (relative to East Bengali Hindus) and take pride in the stateâs apparent restitution of property to Muslim âreturnees,â posits secularism as normative in India as a policy and an
objective condition. I return here to the story of âthwarted communalismâ that I began this paper with.
In that story, East Bengali refugeesâ âmomentaryâ communalism--cast as an aberration--was ostensibly corrected by a liberal appeal to the East Bengali refugee rioters to remember the âgoodâ Muslim. Manas Ray writes, âToday the Left draws its rhetorical force from an act of remembrance:
it asks not to forget the early days of hardship and achievement of the colony peopleâ with the support of the Left in the face of Congress indifference. For those too young to remember, there is another âbrand of the politics of memory that gestures at the treatment meted out to Hindus by the Muslims in undivided Bengal. Those born after the Partition are more eager to subscribe to this thesis of the past.â (188). It is my submission that not only was the good Muslim itself a product of condescension and erasure--and therefore of communalism, but as I have tried to show in this paper, East Bengali refugee identity was predicated on the claim to communal victimhood which explicitly demonized Muslims. Even if one were to accept the argument that Bengali Hindu communalism has been muted relative
to north and west India and that the politics of Hindu nationalism have not gained much ground in West Bengal despite the presence of the second largest populations of Muslims after Uttar Pradesh and a porous border with Bangladesh (Ruud 1996), I would suggest that the case of the East Bengali Hindus
refugees demonstrates the existence and elaboration of a collective cultural memory of âbadâ 23
Muslims, a particular history of Hindu communalism, and a past which may seed anti-Muslim politics in West Bengal in the years to come. While acknowledging East Bengali Hindu refugee agency, it is important to research further its communal effects on the Muslim minority in West Bengal; to examine the dynamics of Bengali refugee communalism, its distinguishing features and self-location relative to the Bharatiya Janata Party and its âfamilyâ of Hindu fundamentalist organizations; and to probe for alternative stories--perhaps those that tell of shared experiences and solidarity among Hindu and Muslim Bengalis.
24
References
Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi:
Viking. Bandyopadhyay, Hironmoy. 1970. Udbastu. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad.
Bose, Nirmal Kumar. 1968. Calcutta: A Social Survey. Bombay: lakshmi Publishing House.
Chakrabarti, Prafulla K.1990. The Marginal Men. Calcutta: Lumiere Books.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1995. Remembered Villeges: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories
In the Aftermath of the Partition. South Asia 28:109-129.
Chakraborty, Saroj.1982. With B.C.Roy and Other Chief Ministers. Calcutta: Rajat Chakraborty.
Chatterjee, Nilanjana. 1992. Midnightâs Unwanted Children: East Bengali Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.
Daniel, Valentine & Knudsen, John eds. 1995. Mistrusting Refugees. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, Veena. 1990. Introduction. In Mirrors of Violence; Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 1-36. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Das, Veena & Nandy, Ashis. 1985. Violence, Victimhood and the Language of Silence.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 19(1): 177-195.
Dasgupta, Anindita. 2000. Denial and Resistance: Sylheti Partition ârefugeesâ in Assam.
Contemporary South Asia 10(3): 343-360.
Deb, Arun. 2000. The UCRC: Its Role in Establishing the Rights of Refugee Squatters in Calcutta.
In Refugees in West Bengal, ed, Pradip Kumar Bose, 65-79. Calcutta: Calcutta
Research Group.
Estimates Committee. Rehabilitation of Migrants from East Bengal. New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat.
Gangopadhyay, Sunil.1987. Arjun. New Delhi: Penguin.
Ghosh, Gautam. 1998. God is a Refugee: Nationality, Morality and History in the 1947 Partition of India. Social Analysis 42(1): 33-62.
Government of West Bengal. 1980. Report of the Refugee Rehabilitation Committee. Calcutta:
Saraswati Press.
Guha, B.S. 1959. Studies in Social Tensions Among Refugees from Eastern Pakistan. Calcutta:
Government of India.
Indian Commission of Jurists. 1965. Recurrent Exodus of Minorities from East Pakistan. New Delhi: Purshottamdas Trikamdas.
Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Luthra, P.N. Rehabilitation. 1972. New Delhi: Government of India Publications.
Maitreye Devi. Exodus. Calcutta: Nabajatak Printers.
Malkki, Liisa. 1996. Speechless Emissaries:Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.
Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377-404.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1987. Kingdomâs End and Other Stories. London: Verso.
Menon, Ritu & Bhasin, Kamla. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indiaâs Partition. New 25 Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Metcalf, Barbara D. 1995. Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India. Journal of Asian Studies 54(4): 951-967.
Ministry of Rehabilitation, Govt. Of India. 1957. Annual Report, 1955-56. New Delhi:
Government of India Publications.
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
------1992. In Defense of the Fragment:Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.
Representations 37(Winter): 27-55.
Ray, Manas. 2000. Growing Up Refugee: Memory and Locality. In Refugees in West Bengal, ed,
Pradip Kumar Bose, 163-195. Calcutta: Calcutta Research Group.
Ruud, Arild Engelsen. 1996. Contradictions and Ambivalence in the Hindu Nationalist Discourse
in West Bengal. In Asian Forms of the Nation, ed. Stein Tonnesson et al, 151-180.
Richmond: Curzon.
Zolberg, Aristide et al. 1989. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pamphlets:
Refugee Central Rehabilitation Committee. n.d. In the Interest of Stable Rehabilitation. Calcutta.
East Bengali Minority Welfare Association. n.d. Aitihashik Adhikar. Calcutta: Gouranga Press.
Newspapers:
Ananda Bazar Patrika
Amrita Bazar Patrika
The Statesman
The following is a commie viewpoint of the hindu refugee flow from east bengal
http://www.pstc.brown.edu/chatterjee.PDF
Page 21 - 25
If this strand of elite East Bengali public discourse is implicitly dismissive of Muslims, the refugee testimonies of victimhood across class tend to be overtly anti-Muslim. In recognition of this, the Government of India instituted an investigation of âsocial tensionsâ among refugees from East Bengal in 1950 under the direction of the Anthropological Survey. The report noted âmarked tensionâ against Muslims irrespective of caste status and sex, though found it âsoftenedâ among upper castes
because of their education and stronger among women across caste because of their âidentificationâ with âtraditional ideologyâ (Guha 1959: ix). The negative stereotype of the Muslim which emerged in this study included such characteristics as cruelty, crudeness, lust, cow-killing, treachery, dirtiness and fanaticism. According to the researchers, the most significant feature about the stereotype was its ânonpolitical and nonreligious natureâ--its emphasis on what they termed the âbehavioral.â âThe political ideology of the Muslim League or features of Islam as a religion found no place in it. Though aggravated by political conflicts in recent years, the basic roots of tension lay in deeper trends of personality structure which prevented Hindus from identifying with Muslimsâ (ibid). The suggestion
is that the refugee rhetoric of victimhood constructed the East Bengali Muslim as the ontological âOtherâ of the Hindu--both superhuman in ferocity, strength and rampant sexuality, and subhuman because of dirtiness--associated with the moral pollution of beef consumption--rather than the physical, and with treachery and sexual transgression. And while I would question the analytical
relevance of âpersonality structuresâ the broader point the report made is that the opposition between Hindus and Muslims was cast in essentialized terms rather than in those of historical or local context.
This hegemonic narrative about âthe Muslim,â systematically circulated in the press, pamphlets and commemorative literature and repeated in private in story and rumour, both erased the Muslimâs docile presence in an idyllic Bengali past and demonized âhisâ15 antagonistic presence in a language of excess.
15The negative and totalizing image of the Muslim in East Bengali refugee stories is
explicitly gendered as male.
What was the immediate implication of this refugee rhetoric of prejudice and antipathy? While East Bengali refugees who sought asylum in India represented themselves as victims of Muslim communalism to claim refugee status and thereby humanitarian assistance, they found it very difficult to influence the stateâs rehabilitation intervention and experienced both relief and long-term rehabilitation policy as painfully inadequate. Large numbers of frustrated refugees took matters into their own hands and began to âresettleâ themselves by squatting on land they argued to be unoccupied and unused. The words they used were âvacant,â and the Bengali equivalent âkhaliâ as well as âpatitâ or abandoned, and âjola jamiâ which meant marshland. The impression these words conveyed was clearly that such lands were marginal and available for settlement--which was referred to as âcolonyâ construction. In some cases this land belonged to the state, but for the most part the refugees squatted on privately owned property including that belonging to local West Bengali Muslims. Particularly in the areas around the city of Calcutta, many refugee settlements were established on land âformerly inhabited by Muslim labourers and artisansâ who were âreplaced by displaced Hindus from East Pakistanâ (Bose 1968:33). Many Muslims were dispossessed of their homes in the city leading to their âghettoizationâ in a few neighbourhoods (Deb 2000:68). It could be argued that East Bengali refugee settlement across West Bengal affected the minority Muslim community most adversely. While 22 researching refugee self-settlement strategies I visited colonies on the outskirts of Calcutta as well as along the Hooghly river. It was not uncommon for me to be told while I was being shown around a colony by a refugee settler, that a soccer field or community gathering point was once a âMusalmanâ eggplant field or graveyard, or that when the East Bengalis arrived the land was âovergrown with weeds, home to jackals and mosquitos, and a handful Muslims whose homes consisted of shacksâ (Interview with Paresh Haldar, 1988). There were a few instances when I noticed the contours of a mosque or Muslim saintsâs shrine in the foundation of a refugee home. The need of the refugeesâ for new homes pitted them against local West Bengalis, but the widespread dispossession of West Bengali Muslims must be seen as a manifestation of East Bengali refugee communalism driven by as
much revenge, as a racist consciousness that marginalized or erased Muslim presence in the new refugee homeland of West Bengal.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPM emerged as the main political opposition to the ruling Congress regime in West Bengal after Partition, and as the âold guardâ like to tell it, party workers recognized the destabilizing force of East Bengali refugee anger against Muslims and the imperative to resettle them. This prompted the Leftâs inclusion of the refugee cause in its broader programme of redistributive justice--a move which they claimed to have âneutralizedâ refugee communalism, helped prevent large-scale violence against West Bengali Muslims and minimized the ir migration to Pakistan (Interviews with Bijoy Mazumdar, Anil Sinha, 1988-89). Gyan Pandey has argued that the history of sectarian violence âhas been treated in the historiography of modern India as aberration and absenceâ (1992: 27). In the Leftâs master narrative of successful leadership of
subaltern movements, the material or economic has been stressed as an explanation for Hindu-Muslim conflict. In this version the East Bengali refugeesâ communalism--and expropriation of Muslims--is represented as an aberration, a distortion of the normal condition of inter-community harmony., cultural syncretism and class solidarity, corrected as it were by the Left successful efforts at
consciousness raising. This erases the recent history of East Bengali communalism, and marginalizes Muslim victims. The fact that the Congress and the CPM insist on a small figure for Muslim outmigration to Pakistan (relative to East Bengali Hindus) and take pride in the stateâs apparent restitution of property to Muslim âreturnees,â posits secularism as normative in India as a policy and an
objective condition. I return here to the story of âthwarted communalismâ that I began this paper with.
In that story, East Bengali refugeesâ âmomentaryâ communalism--cast as an aberration--was ostensibly corrected by a liberal appeal to the East Bengali refugee rioters to remember the âgoodâ Muslim. Manas Ray writes, âToday the Left draws its rhetorical force from an act of remembrance:
it asks not to forget the early days of hardship and achievement of the colony peopleâ with the support of the Left in the face of Congress indifference. For those too young to remember, there is another âbrand of the politics of memory that gestures at the treatment meted out to Hindus by the Muslims in undivided Bengal. Those born after the Partition are more eager to subscribe to this thesis of the past.â (188). It is my submission that not only was the good Muslim itself a product of condescension and erasure--and therefore of communalism, but as I have tried to show in this paper, East Bengali refugee identity was predicated on the claim to communal victimhood which explicitly demonized Muslims. Even if one were to accept the argument that Bengali Hindu communalism has been muted relative
to north and west India and that the politics of Hindu nationalism have not gained much ground in West Bengal despite the presence of the second largest populations of Muslims after Uttar Pradesh and a porous border with Bangladesh (Ruud 1996), I would suggest that the case of the East Bengali Hindus
refugees demonstrates the existence and elaboration of a collective cultural memory of âbadâ 23
Muslims, a particular history of Hindu communalism, and a past which may seed anti-Muslim politics in West Bengal in the years to come. While acknowledging East Bengali Hindu refugee agency, it is important to research further its communal effects on the Muslim minority in West Bengal; to examine the dynamics of Bengali refugee communalism, its distinguishing features and self-location relative to the Bharatiya Janata Party and its âfamilyâ of Hindu fundamentalist organizations; and to probe for alternative stories--perhaps those that tell of shared experiences and solidarity among Hindu and Muslim Bengalis.
24
References
Butalia, Urvashi. 1998. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi:
Viking. Bandyopadhyay, Hironmoy. 1970. Udbastu. Calcutta: Sahitya Samsad.
Bose, Nirmal Kumar. 1968. Calcutta: A Social Survey. Bombay: lakshmi Publishing House.
Chakrabarti, Prafulla K.1990. The Marginal Men. Calcutta: Lumiere Books.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1995. Remembered Villeges: Representations of Hindu-Bengali Memories
In the Aftermath of the Partition. South Asia 28:109-129.
Chakraborty, Saroj.1982. With B.C.Roy and Other Chief Ministers. Calcutta: Rajat Chakraborty.
Chatterjee, Nilanjana. 1992. Midnightâs Unwanted Children: East Bengali Refugees and the Politics of Rehabilitation. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation.
Daniel, Valentine & Knudsen, John eds. 1995. Mistrusting Refugees. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, Veena. 1990. Introduction. In Mirrors of Violence; Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 1-36. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Das, Veena & Nandy, Ashis. 1985. Violence, Victimhood and the Language of Silence.
Contributions to Indian Sociology 19(1): 177-195.
Dasgupta, Anindita. 2000. Denial and Resistance: Sylheti Partition ârefugeesâ in Assam.
Contemporary South Asia 10(3): 343-360.
Deb, Arun. 2000. The UCRC: Its Role in Establishing the Rights of Refugee Squatters in Calcutta.
In Refugees in West Bengal, ed, Pradip Kumar Bose, 65-79. Calcutta: Calcutta
Research Group.
Estimates Committee. Rehabilitation of Migrants from East Bengal. New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat.
Gangopadhyay, Sunil.1987. Arjun. New Delhi: Penguin.
Ghosh, Gautam. 1998. God is a Refugee: Nationality, Morality and History in the 1947 Partition of India. Social Analysis 42(1): 33-62.
Government of West Bengal. 1980. Report of the Refugee Rehabilitation Committee. Calcutta:
Saraswati Press.
Guha, B.S. 1959. Studies in Social Tensions Among Refugees from Eastern Pakistan. Calcutta:
Government of India.
Indian Commission of Jurists. 1965. Recurrent Exodus of Minorities from East Pakistan. New Delhi: Purshottamdas Trikamdas.
Kakar, Sudhir. 1996. The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion and Conflict.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Luthra, P.N. Rehabilitation. 1972. New Delhi: Government of India Publications.
Maitreye Devi. Exodus. Calcutta: Nabajatak Printers.
Malkki, Liisa. 1996. Speechless Emissaries:Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.
Cultural Anthropology 11(3): 377-404.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. 1987. Kingdomâs End and Other Stories. London: Verso.
Menon, Ritu & Bhasin, Kamla. 1998. Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indiaâs Partition. New 25 Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Metcalf, Barbara D. 1995. Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India. Journal of Asian Studies 54(4): 951-967.
Ministry of Rehabilitation, Govt. Of India. 1957. Annual Report, 1955-56. New Delhi:
Government of India Publications.
Pandey, Gyanendra. 1990. The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
------1992. In Defense of the Fragment:Writing About Hindu-Muslim Riots in India Today.
Representations 37(Winter): 27-55.
Ray, Manas. 2000. Growing Up Refugee: Memory and Locality. In Refugees in West Bengal, ed,
Pradip Kumar Bose, 163-195. Calcutta: Calcutta Research Group.
Ruud, Arild Engelsen. 1996. Contradictions and Ambivalence in the Hindu Nationalist Discourse
in West Bengal. In Asian Forms of the Nation, ed. Stein Tonnesson et al, 151-180.
Richmond: Curzon.
Zolberg, Aristide et al. 1989. Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pamphlets:
Refugee Central Rehabilitation Committee. n.d. In the Interest of Stable Rehabilitation. Calcutta.
East Bengali Minority Welfare Association. n.d. Aitihashik Adhikar. Calcutta: Gouranga Press.
Newspapers:
Ananda Bazar Patrika
Amrita Bazar Patrika
The Statesman