Gyan Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India

Preface(s)

Let's start with the familiar critique of this book: communalism is ultimately attributable to colonial discourse, the
phantom product of Western colonial power-knowledge and its classificatory strategies. First of all, Pandey makes it
clear that anti-colonial secular nationalists were at the forefront of negotiating the category of communalism, by
stereotyping this discrete, substantive political tendency as the conceptual other of nationalism. Moreover, he
emphasizes that communalism as a colonial mode of knowledge only means that it was the product of a particular
interpretation of history in which perennial religious battles were constantly re-enacted between already always-
constituted and sharply differentiated communities of Hindus and Muslims. The point is that communalism should
not be studied in isolation from other political trends of the colonial and postcolonial period. What this book
investigates is “the meanings that different participants in the sectarian politics of the period—local Hindus and
Muslims, nationalist spokesmen, colonial officials—attached to these politics.” Pandey's concern is not only with
social, economic, and political “facts,” but with how historians, administrators, politicans, and “the people about
whom we know least of all” have isolated “facts” and served them up as “history” (xvii). The discourse of
communalism—the concept, the vocabulary—is as much a part of its politics as any notion of real, lived experience.

Chapter One—Introduction

Histories written over the last century have been national histories, and this is no different for modern India.
Communalism became a stand-in, beginning in conservative colonialist writing, for a subcontinental version of
nationalism—same-same, but different. By contrast, for Indian nationalists, communalism was important because it
was not nationalism—it was, in fact, together with colonialism, nationalism's chief adversary. Both of these
formulations rest on the ahistorical notion of the “nation” as a pure, fixed entity. In historical writings on South Asia,
colonialist as well as nationalist, the concept of communalism and that of nationalism emerge as predetermined—
Indian history being a deviation from the European model—instead of as the outcome of historical processes. Since
communalism appeared in that particular political discourse of colonial India as “the central problem to be overcome
in the development of a self-governing, national, and democratic polity in India,” the study of communalism is part of
“a larger exercise aimed at understanding the construction of Indian society and politics in recent times” (5). This
book analyzes a construction of knowledge about Indian society—the construction of a sociology and a history that
can be summarized as “communalism.” It explores the history of the “problem” of communalism by examining the
discourse that gave it meaning; in other words, what do we accomplish when applying the term “communalism” to
the history of Hindu-Muslim (or Hindu-Sikh, etc.) relations in colonial North India?

Communalism is a form of colonialist knowledge. In academic usage, the term is applied to “organized political
movements based on the proclaimed interests of a religious community, usually in response to...another religious
community” (6). Yet the term is never applied in this sense to feudal Europe or other pre-capitalist societies, nor in
reference to Protestant-Catholic conflict in Northern Ireland. It is reserved for “the analysis of social and political
conflict in the 'backward' parts of the colonial and post-colonial world, and then read back by some analysts as a
quality that must have existed in these societies long before the colonial intervention” (7). Communalism captured
for the colonialists what they had conceptualized as a basic feature of Indian society—its religious bigotry and
fundamentally irrational character—which denies history, consciousness, and agency to colonized peoples (10). In
the colonialist view, communalism was age-old, essential to and more or less universal among Indians, except among
the enlightened/liberal/Western-educated. In the nationalist view, however, communalism was a problem with
relatively recent origins, the outcome of economic and political inequality and conflict, and the handiwork of self-
interested elite groups (11). But although these conceptions differ on the face of it, both the racist-essentialist and
the liberal-rationalist view of Indian politics accept the givenness of communalism—a tangible phenomenon whose
causes can be identified and which must be overcome for progress to be possible (12-13).

The false totalities of ready-made religious communities have largely been undermined by recent historians—
liberal-nationalist, Marxist, even neo-colonialist—who have pointed out the immense differences in language,
occupation, economic interest, and religious practice among Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, etc. of different regions, castes,
and classes (13). However, some old views still remain current, such as the “continuity” argument, put forward by
Christopher Bayly and others, which suggests that much that happened in colonial India—in this particular case,
communal conflict—had its beginnings in the centuries before the arrival of the British, and that colonial
intervention did not mark the drastic rupture which it has generally been assigned (15). This argument overlooks the
radically altered nature of the state under colonialism—more modern, powerful, centralized, and interventionist
than any prior “state” in the subcontinent. Another old view which persists is the search for “causes” and
“rationality,” which reduces sectarian movements and conflict to economistic explanations. All this does is replace
the Orientalist-essentalist view of Eastern irrationality with the false universal of bourgeois rationality. In sum, we
must question the givenness of communalism by underscoring its historical character. As Benedict Anderson has
shown, all communities are imagined, made; categories of thought, too, are “made” in this sense (22).

Chapter Two—The Colonial Construction of the Indian Past

Colonialist writers more or less established the pattern of the Indian past as we know it today. Sectarian strife was an
important motif in that pattern. The reading of Indian history which represented religious conflict as a distinctive
feature of Indian society was distinguished in three ways: a) its periodization in terms of the European experience
(ancient/medieval/modern); b) its use of communal (religious) categories to differentiate those periods of history
(viz. Hindu classical age/Muslim dark age/British renaissance); and c) the emptying out of all history from the
political experience of the people and the identification of religion as the moving force of Indian politics (23-4). This
chapter asks how reports of sectarian strife were received by contemporary and subsequent observers, what
meanings were derived from them, and what place they were assigned in different representations of the changing
colonial world—in other words, how colonialist observers (gazetteers, administrators) “read” the history of Hindu-
Muslim strife in coming to terms with Indian society (26). Exemplary are the evolving historical perceptions of the
1809 Hindu-Muslim riots in Banaras, and how a particular experience of religious antagonism comes to apply to the
country as a whole (28). Not only are there discrepancies between the earliest and most “authoritative” accounts of
the 1809 riots, but the “bare facts” of the situation were constructed out of the prejudices, biases, and “common
sense” of the writers (32). Some of these differences across the colonial accounts are as follows:

 The figures of 28 people killed and 70 wounded get inflated to “several hundred” killed in the District
Gazetteer of 1907 and the Government Memorandum of 1928.
 The site of the initial outbreak shifts from the Lat Bhairava temple a mile outside the city to the Vishwanath
temple at the city's center.
 The cause of the conflict is displaced from the desecration of the Lat Bhairava idol, to the “frenzy” excited by
Muharram lamentations, to a clash between Holi and Muharram processions, to “friction” over the mosque
built by Aurangzeb (17th C.) at the current site of the Vishwanath temple.

The reconstruction of the Banaras riots in colonialist discourse, in its successive recensions spread out over
approxmiately a hundred years, assumes over time the importance of a master narrative, a model for all descriptions
and evaluations of communal riots in official prose (32). The colonial exercise of giving a cause and a name
(fanaticism, irrationality) to the violence of 1809 not only emptied it of any other significance (or context, or history),
but it established the fundamental antagonism between “Hindus” and “Muslims” (39). Colonial writings on Banaras
in the early nineteenth century have certain recurring features: the emphasis on ethnic and doctrinal signs for the
identification of rival crowds; the construction of a diachrony into which these events fitted; the description of
violence as a means of describing native character (39-40). In this kind of history, “violence” always belonged to a
pre-colonial tradition: the imposition of British rule, the displacement of an earlier balance of power, had nothing to
do with it. The tradition of strife becomes the justification for colonial rule—by the late nineteenth century, it is no
longer English military or scientific or commercial prowess but the hopeless divisions and primitive passions of the
“natives” that legitimizes British power (45).

One striking component of these colonial writings, and another legacy of nationalist historiography, is the reduction
of Indian history to the history of the state. The new, colonial state stood out in contrast to the pre-political, proto-
historic character of local society. In the case of Banaras, James Mill wrote that the maintenance of peace and order in
that cirty was “for some time” a “troublesome” and “imperfectly” accomplished task. But the “unrelaxing firmness” of
British rule, a “better knowledge of the British character” and the “improving intelligence” of the Indians “lightened
the labour” (i.e. the divinely ordained British task of bringing law and order) so that ten years after 1809, Banaras
was “regulated with as much facility as any other city in the territories of the Company” (cf. Mill, History of British
India, Vol. VII, pp. 338-9). In other words, the pre-history of Banaras, as that of all India before the coming of British
power, is chaos, and, within ten years, history supervenes, order is established (46). These writings efface the
violence of the colonial state, promoting a picture of a wise and neutral power, ruling by the sheer force of moral
authority (49).

Finally, the colonial narrative on communal strife—the “communal riot narrative”—throughout the nineteenth
century and beyond followed a particular model, unfettered by time or space. It proceeded by identifying the “first”
major riot (usually the first recorded after the establishment of British rule), and then tracing a straight line through
to the “last,” which naturally changes with the date of the writing (62-3). In this model, any riot can stand in for
another, and all that can be usefully compared is the magnitude of violence—thus a description of the “first” outbreak
indicates the character of all subsequent strife, such that Mubarakpur in 1813 = Shahabad in 1917 = Bombay in 1893
(63). The phrases that make for the history of these places in the nineteenth century are “fanatical and clannish”
entities, “disorderly sections of the population,” communities “prone to dacoity and rioting,” “fires of religious
animosity,” and “indiscriminate affrays” (64). This is of course not a history, but an ideological equation of rioting,
bigotry, and criminality with an inferior people and a people without history—a “native” violence is distinguished
here from the unacknowledged but “legitimate” violence of the colonial state (64). The violence of the native has
specifically Oriental characteristics; it is helpless, irrational, and related to the age-old flames of sectarian strife. This
is what constitutes the Indian past (65).

Chapter Three—The Bigoted Julaha

[See in this connection Chapter 3 in Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe, “Translating Life-Worlds,” pp. 78-
80. Chakrabarty questions Pandey's universalization of the figure of the weaver between Marx, E.P. Thompson, and
the julahas of colonial U.P. In particular, he is concerned with the imposition of the secular time of history on the
singular time of gods and spirits—that the particular life-worlds of the julahas, in which work and worship (i.e. labor
and the spirits) are not dissociated from one another, cannot be subsumed to the “History 1” of the globalizing urges
of capital.]

Colonial historiography of the past was accompanied by a colonial sociology of the present. The central organizing
principle of Indian society in the colonial records shifted over the course of the nineteenth century from the “village
community” to “caste.” This was concomitant with a shift in the colonial concern with revenue to the concern for law
and order. With “castes,” colonial sociology sought to map the qualities of the subject population that were most
germane to the business of administration—“not only a group's productive capacity, its traditional occupation, its
(established or reputed) efficiency, laziness, etc. but also its criminality, military prowess, truthfulness, litigious
tendencies, rebelliousness, and so on” (68). This chapter discusses one caste-stereotype, that of the “bigoted Julaha”
(weaver) and its importance in the explanation of sectarian strife in northern India. The larger question is that “the
relationship in colonialist discourse between 'sociology' and 'history'--'caste' and the politicized 'religious
community', or, in other words, 'caste' and 'communalism'” (69).

Muslim weavers' involvement in Hindu-Muslim conflict is unsurprising, since they constituted the largest segment of
the Muslim minority in the U.P. region, and they were concentrated in towns where the possibilities of violent
conflict were greater (70). Moreover, the weaving communities of the north Indian hinterland were subjected to
many new economic hardships—the decline of handicrafts, the deprivation of educational opportunity, urban
migration—with the onset of colonialism and the market economy (72-8). It is a small step from
weaver/moneylender to Muslim/Hindu conflict, but the reality is a little more complex. First of all, religion should
not be taken as a surrogate for something else, but neither is it all-encompassing and unchanging; in nineteenth
century northern India, the presence of a new colonial regime (of knowledge-power) was very consequential in
determining the character of public religion and religious issues—in particular, the regime's drive to catalogue, to
reify, and to record “established” customs and practices that had always contained a great deal of fluidity. The
institution of “caste,” even more than “religion,” represents an outstanding example. New caste movements and
status claims in the nineteenth century were not only negotiated within, but largely accentuated by the hierarchical
classificatory efforts of the colonial Census (82-3).

The centrality of the loom in the Julaha community united work and worship to such an extent that economic
struggle was closely entwined (pun intended) with religious sentiments. As part of the Julahas' fight to preserve and
improve their economic and social status, prominent groups of weavers guarded against innovations that would
reduce the importance of their religious festivals and places of worship. On account of these diverse, at times
desperate struggles by weavers in many different places, the community acquired the reputation of being
“uncompromising, easily aroused, violent Muslims: a community of 'fanatical', 'clannish' and 'bigoted' Julahas.” This
stereotype effectively erased the different self-images and historical circumstances of different groups of Muslim
weavers in northern India (102). Moreover, this image of Julaha bigotry was drawn up in colonialist writings on the
basis of only the Gazetteers of four U.P. districts—Banaras, Ghazipur, Ballia, and Azamgarh—where “the existence of
many old centres [sic] of cloth production, the numerical strength of the weavers in these 'urban' localities, the self-
image and pride of the weavers, combined with the economic, social, and political disloation of the colonial period
and the renewed struggles for power and prestige that came along with this, brought the Julahas out in numerous
acts of resistance and repeated outbreaks of fighting over the prized symbols of Hinduism and Islam” (104-5).

The point here is that the myth distorts reality by taking history out of it. As Barthes writes, “Myth is depoliticized
speech....It deprives the object of which it speaks of all History. In it history evaporates...all that is left for one to do is
to enjoy this beautiful [or ugly] object without wondering where it came from. Or even better: it can only come from
eternity” (Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 143, 151). In colonial sociology, “caste” is not just an organizing principle of
Indian society; it becomes the site of particular instincts, tendencies, and urges. It is through this quality of having
innate, unchanging properties that caste feeds into communalism, which has more to do with a kind of culture—“of
unreasonableness, narrowness, dogmatism and violence, all arising at bottom out of an irrational, primitive
religiosity. For the colonialist...if caste was the defining unit of Indian society, communalism was its defining culture”
(108).

--I have omitted Chapter 4 in this summary, since it deals with a particular local history which is does not
contribute significantly to the overall thesis. Here are two paragraphs, however, from Chapter 5 which are
important to the argument that belonging to a “Hindu” and “Muslim” community did not always mean
responding to “Hindu” and “Muslim” interest: many other factors, caste in particular, had far more weight in
terms of local community solidarity--

“All this is not to suggest that 'Hindu' and 'Muslim' interests or the notion of a 'Hindu (or Muslim) community' had no
meaning for the vast majority of local castes, in the Bhojpuri region or elsewhere....But the relevant point, perhaps, is
that apperception at the local level during the early nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, was very much
in terms of jati and biradari, caste and kinship, that the strength of local caste and community organization mattered
(in that decisions were most often taken and/or channelled [sic] through them), and that the feeling of belonging to a
wider 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' community did not mean—in spite of all that colonialist historiography and sociology had
to say on the subject—that 'Hindus' and 'Muslims' responded automatically and in unvarying ways to every appeal
for action on behalf of 'Hindu' or 'Muslim' interests.

The point possibly applies with greater force to the Hindu community than to the 'Muslim', because, unlike the latter,
the 'Hindu community' was far from being small, concentrated in particular localities, or bound by anything in the
way of a 'revealed' book or a 'united' church. The all-India 'Hindu community' (and, to a large extent, the all-India
'Muslim community' too) was a colonial creation for, as I have argued, the social and economic changes brought by
colonialism, Indian efforts to defend the indigenous religions and culture against western missionary attacks, the
'unifying' drive of the colonial state—which was marked at the level of administrative structure and attempted
political control...tended to promote the idea of an all-India 'Hindu community' and an all-India 'Muslim community'
which were supposedly ranged against one another for much of the time. In spite of a widely felt sense of 'Hinduness'
and 'Muslimsness', I would suggest that until the nineteenth century at any rate, people always had to work through
caste, sect and so on to arrive at the unities implied in the conception of the 'Hindu community' and the 'Muslim
community'.” (198-9)

Chapter Six—'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan'

By the early years of the twentieth century, the sense of religious community was far more widespread than ever
before. Reform movements, religious debates, administrative demands, census operations, and representative
politics pushed elite groups among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs to: a) appropriate marginal groups (“untouchable” =
“Hindu”); b) purify their domains (“Muslim” ≠ “Hindu”); and c) establish their separate identities (eg. the Singh
Sabha's famous proclamation Ham Hindu Nahin, “We are not Hindus”). Along with the mobilization of Hindu and
Muslim communities went the attempt to build “nationalist” feeling that transcended these boundaries and narrow
interests (204-5).The ambiguity in Indian nationalism—that is, the contradiction between a “modernist” idiom of
secular cosmopolitanism and the “dharmic” idiom of precolonial tradition—has been viewed by some as a tactical
necessity and by others as a constitutive split (208). Pandey suggests that there is a third idiom: on the one hand,
nationalism must speak in the language of rationality, the equality of all individuals; on the other hand, it needs the
language of historical necessity, of ancient status and attributes, which is part of the discourse of community (209).
The question is: how was the imagined political community of the future (à la Anderson) being constructed by Indian
nationalists at different times? The answer is: prior to the 1920s and 1930s, the nation of Indians was visualized as a
composite body, a collection of communities, each with its own history and culture and contribution to a common
nationality. After this, India came to be seen much more as a collection of individuals, of Indian “citizens.” The concept
of communalism, according to Pandey, was articulated in the context of this shift (210). This chapter peruses the
writings of Hindu and Muslim nationalist writers—Bhartendu Harishcandra, R.C. Dutt, Syed Ahmed Khan—to discern
a particular vision of nationhood. The evidence from the turn of the century points, on the one hand, to a political
vision of emerging or potential unity based on the common interests of all Indians. On the other hand, it indicates the
existence of a vision of society as already formed into discrete communities, each with its own priorities and
interests and each with the right to determine its own future (231).

Chapter Seven—Nationalism Versus Communalism

This chapter represents the second part of the argument made above: that sometime around the 1920s,
communitarian mobilization as had been articulated previously came to be regarded by more and more nationalist
observers as a distorting tendency. “Hindu” and “Muslim” politics became divisive, primitive, and the product of a
colonial policy of Divide and Rule. This was the birthplace of the nationalist version of the concept of “communalism.”
Indeed, Indian nationalism itself, as standing above (or outside) the different religious communities, and taking as its
constitutive unit the individual citizen untainted by the “primordial” pulls of caste and religious community, was
conceptualized only on opposition to this notion of communalism. The point is that communalism and nationalism as
we know them today arose together; they were part of the same discourse (235-6).

The binary opposition between nationalism and communalism entailed a careful re-examination and presentation of
the Indian past. This reconstructed history emphasized not only the tolerance and synthesizing capacities that had
gone into the making of Indian civilization, it would also show the commitment of all India's prior inhabitants to the
soil, to the State, and to the nation—in other words, the priority of a “secular national loyalty” over any loyalty to
religion, caste, or race. Nationalists now claimed, in opposition to colonialist assertions about the impossibility of
uniting Indians, the fundamental, essential unity of India, based on its geographical boundaries, economic self-
sufficiency, and the interdependence of its various parts (247). “In the nationalist discourse of the twentieth century,
then, the unity of India appeared as a demonstrable but at the same time a metaphysical truth. 'India' became the
nation personified” (249). This oversimplification of history is common to all nationalisms, but what was missing in
the Indian case was the sense of the common people (instead of the great rulers of India—Muslims, Rajputs,
Buddhists) as historical agents, of the peoples and classes of the subcontinent struggling to realize their many
versions of truth, honour [sic] and the just life. “There was no room here for an accommodation of local loyalties, for
continued attachment to religion, or even appreciation of the vigorous struggles that had been waged against these;
nor much allowance for the class-divided and regionally diverse perceptions of the 'imagined community' (Anderson
again), out of the struggle for which Indian nationalism and the Indian national movement arose” (253). By denying
the subjecthood of the Indian people, nationalist historiography shared with colonialism a kind of statist perspective:
for the colonialists, “the state alone...could establish order out of chaos, reduce the religious and other passions of
Indians to 'civilized' proportions, and carry India into 'modernity.' So, too, in the nationalist account, the Indian state
had performed the role of maintaining Indian unity in the past and would do so in the future” (253).

The nationalist redefinition of politics in the 1930s and 1940s excluded problems like communalism from the realm
of the political. They attempted to subjugate the “social”—the religious and other pre-existing communities—to the
“political” world—the mass of people mobilized into a new national community. However, they could not accomplish
this subjugation, because they could never quite decide whether communalism was a social or a political problem.
And even as the new religion of secular nationalism was being articulated, there were many vacillations and
compromises made to accommodate Hindu and Muslim communal interests. [For an example of how the ostensibly
secular Congress Party wilfully protected and empowered Hindu partisan ideologues after independence, in many
ways setting the stage for present-day resurgence of the politics of religious extremism, see a recent article by Manu
Bhagavan, “The Hindutva Underground: Hindu Nationalism and the Indian National Congress in Late Colonial and
Early Postcolonial India,” The Economic and Political Weekly (Special Article, 13 Sept. 2008): 39-48]. The nation was,
and continues to be, the outcome of many different visions—including the rights of the individual, of the poorest and
longest oppressed—and the struggles between them. It is between these different conceptions of nationhood that the
struggle must still be waged (261).

Afterword (2005)

[I quote from the last two pages of the afterword, because they are fabulous]

“In the plural societies of large parts of Asia and Africa, where neither absolutist nor conquest state had emerged in
the early modern period to homogenize religious traditions and cultural practices, the politics of communalism—or
what has been called communalism—arose in the colonial period to become a major factor in political debates. Such
a politics was often seen, justifiably, as disruptive of emerging struggles of nationhood and independence, especially
since there was always a danger that communalist campaigns would sprout separate national movements of their
own. But movements of this kind were also a part of emerging political contests in these complex, multi-layered,
plural societies—one element in the negotiation of political futures, the outcome of which was hardly predictable in
advance.

The increasingly centralized nationalist states that have arisen all over the world since then have altered the political
equation almost beyond recognition. The statist chauvinisms that have often followed the establishment of these
nation-states have refused to enter into any dialogue with the kinds of sectional, sectarian, or cultural movements
that were once labelled [sic] 'communalist.' In addition, the 'collapse of socialism', as it is called, the emergence of a
unipolar world, and the onset of aggressive globalization, has eroded the grounds of contestatory democracy even
further.

[…]

[F]or all the talk of a globalized and 'smaller' world, our planet as perhaps a more contradictory and fragmented
place than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago. There are many more sovereign nation-states...the vast majority
of people are recognized as citizens of one state or another (even if there is, once more, a growing number of
refugees and migrants without any surety of this); and there is increased talk, in many countries, of multiculturalism,
of the contributions of privileged migrants and diasporic communities, as well as of the fundamental rights of all men
and women in all parts of the globe. It is in the rhetoric of sovereignty and human rights, in the disorder of our
political world, and in the messiness of our search for new intellectual/political ends, that we will still find grounds
for struggle.” (281-2)