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MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL
 For My Father And Mother
who gave me a love of books
but from whom I also learnt
that people are to be most dearly cherished
First Published 1982
© 1982 J.H. Broomfield

Published by

Ramesh Jain
Manohar Publications
2 Ansari Road, Darya Ganj
New Delhi-110002

Printed at

Dhawan Printing Works

27-A Mayapuri, Phase I
New Delhi-110064
 For My Father And Mother
who gave me a love of books
but from whom I also learnt
that people are to be most dearly cherished
 Preface

It is 20 years since I began research on modern South

Asia. There’s a sobering thought! It seems a good time to take
stock, and what better way than by collecting the scattered
products of that research so they can be critically re-examined
by myself and others? I doubt there is anyone who has read all
the articles republished in this volume, certainly no one in
South Asia where foreign journals are so difficult to obtain.
One of my major objectives is to make them more readily
available here, to have the benefit of criticism from South
Asian colleagues.
The process of unearthing one’s old writings—a personal,
intellectual archaeology—is not without pain. There are things
I have said that I would not nowadays care to repeat. Some
(dare I admit it?) are gauche, brash, or downright wrong.
Well—more eminent women and men than I have “mispoken”
themselves these past few years. I have made no attempt to
tinker with the articles. They are reprinted as they originally
appeared, with only misprints and a few bald factual errors
eliminated.
Looking through the work I see evidence of intellectual
growth. My first published article, “A Plea for the Study of the
Indian Provincial Legislatures”, opened with a quotation from
one of Nirad Chaudhuri’s fulsome tributes to imperialism. Yet
by 1963 my favourable view of the record of British rule in
Vlll
PREFACE

India was already sufficiently modified to provoke from one of

my doctoral examiners, C.H. Philips, the good-humoured
admonition that I did not give the British even the benefit of
the doubt. I took that as a compliment. In regard to the same
article, it is noteworthy how much has been done in these past
two decades to complete its proposed agenda of regional
studies of political institutions and groups. These have been
extraordinarily productive years for South Asian historians.
Historiographically the most significant article is the first in
the volume because it provoked wide-ranging discussion of the
concepts, region and elite—as much, perhaps, because of its
shortcomings as its strengths. Ironically it was drafted in one
morning, in the summer of 1964 after a weekend’s discussion
with Eugene Irschick of a proposed panel for the following
year’s Association for Asian Studies meetings. It is the only
piece I have ever composed on the typewriter, which probably
explains its distinctive style. The panel, chaired by Bernard
Cohn, had papers from Paul Brass, Irschick, and me, with
W.H. Morris-Jones, Maureen Patterson, and Myron Weiner
as discussants. It preparing for it, Brass, Cohn, Irschick, and I
exchanged memoranda, which we shared with Robert Crane,
who contributed comments. I also discussed our ideas with
O.P. Goyal, who was visiting Michigan. While compiling the
present volume, I re-read the notes and, realising how unusual
and valuable they are, I sought permission of the other parti¬
cipants to publish them as an appendix to the “Regional
Elites” article. They kindly agreed.
I was also reminded of an excitement that accompanied the
panel. Though its date (April 2, 1965) is well-remembered in
the Irschick family, Gene claims only the haziest recollection
of actual proceedings. He arrived late, barely in time to read
his paper, direct from the maternity ward where his wife,
Anne, had just given birth to their first child. That evening the
panelists repaired to the hospital to visit Anne and Jessica, but
there by the bedside became embroiled in a heated debate on
the relative merits and demerits of non-violent resistance.
Professors!
Most of these papers have a story, as I imagine is true of
every historian's work. “The Vote and the Transfer of Power”,
for example, was composed in pique. In March 1961, with my
IX PREFACE

first research visit to Calcutta almost at an end, I had written

to one of my doctoral supervisors, Anthony Low, boasting of
all the archival gems I had mined in the Writers’ Building.
From the reply, it was clear Anthony was far less impressed
than I. He said he doubted I could see the wood for the trees,
and he reminded me that, on return to the Australian National
University, I would be expected to give a work-in-progress
seminar. Feeling thoroughly put out, I sat down to write a
paper that would prove him wrong—and thereby learnt a lesson
from which my own students continue to suffer: a well-timed
kick in the backside stimulates the brain.
The bhadralok made their debut in this same article, but
unfortunately I costumed them improperly. These were early
days, and I had not yet perceived how misleading it is to des¬
cribe them as “Hindu middle class”, which was then the gene¬
rally accepted categorization. As I explain below (“The Non-
Cooperation Decision of 1920”, section III), the bhadralok are
most usefully defined, in the period with which I am dealing
(1900-1930), not as a class but a status group with high rather
than middle ranking.
The book has a second appendix. It comprises comments on
the chapter “Peasant Mobilization in Twentieth-Century
Bengal” by two men who had intimate experience of rural
struggle. One is Mr. Frank Bell, I.C.S., whose service as Settle¬
ment Officer and District Magistrate in the 1930s and 1940s
included such critical districts as Rangpur, Dinajpur, Midnapore
and Dacca. As I mention in a footnote to “The Rural Parvenu”
article, he has preserved his invaluable tour diaries, and depo¬
sited them, along with other papers, at the India Office Library.
Blessed be such friends of scholarship. The second is Dr. Sunil
Sen, to whom the article is dedicated. Now Professor of History
at Rabindra Bharati University, he has provided in his Agrarian
Struggle in Bengal, 1946-47 (New Delhi, 1972), an important
source on the Tebhaga movement, in which he participated. I
am indebted to these gentlemen for allowing me to print their
observations.
One more story will explain another aspect of the book. The
first words my Aunt Winifred ever spoke to me were: “There
should have been a bibliography. It’s a good book, but why is
there no bibliography?” She was referring to my Elite Conflict
X PREFACE

in a Plural Society, published in 1968. I shall leave for the

present the mystery of why I was meeting my aunt for the first
time when well past thirty years of age, and I shall also decline
to answer her question. But the reader will surely appreciate
that, for someone who has been suspected since his student
days of suffering from bibliogmania, I could not risk the
chagrin of repeating that performance. This second book had
to have a bibliography. Though limited to a selection of publish¬
ed works cited in the text, it will prove satisfactory, I trust.
Aunt Win?
The reader’s indulgence is sought in one matter: the overlap
existing in a few places in the articles reprinted here. In two
cases it was considerable enough to make me hesitant about
including the papers, but the press persuaded me there was
value in so doing.
In a book mostly about Bengal, a linguistic region in
which Islam is the religion of the majority, it is regrettable there
is so little about Muslims. It is even more regrettable to observe
that Muslims play a larger part in this book than in most written
on Bengal. There is even less said here about women. I trust that
in the next 20 years, as historians, we shall all broaden our
horizons to encompass more than the male portion. The work
of our female colleagues already points the way.

John Broomfield
 Acknowledgements

In twenty years of research and writing one amasses such

debts of gratitude to people and institutions that it is impossible
to repay in words all who helped, advised, and criticized. My
thanks go to them all, especially to those who assisted in gather¬
ing materials: Anne Epstein, Jenni McGinn, Nancy Mate,
Michael Pearson, Annegret Pollard, Minati Roy, Mukul Roy,
and Niranjan Sen Gupta.
Acknowledgement is given to the following publications in
which the chapters now reprinted originally appeared:

“The Regional Elites: A Theory of Modern Indian History”,

Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. Ill, no. 3,
September 1966.
“The Partition of Bengal: A Problem in British Administra¬
tion, 1830-1912”, Indian History Congress, Proceedings
of the 23rd Session, Aligarh 1960, Part II.
“A Plea for the Study of the Indian Provincial Legislatures”,
Parliamentary Affairs,, vol. XIV, no. 1, Winter 1960-61.
“The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A Study of the
Bengal General Election, 1912-1913”, Journal of Asian
Studies, vol. XXI, no. 2, February 1962.
“The Forgotten Majority: The Bengal Muslims and Septem¬
ber 1918”, and “The Non-Cooperation Decision of 1920:
A Crisis in Bengal Politics”, Soundings in Modern South
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Asian History (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968,

ed. D.A. Low).
‘Four Lives: History as Biography”, South Asia, no. 1,
August 1971.
‘Gandhi: A Twentieth-Century Anomaly?”, Change and the
Persistence of Tradition in India: Five Lectures (Ann Arbor,
Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia no. 2,
Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1971, ed.
Richard L. Park).
‘The Social and Institutional Bases of Politics in Bengal,
1906-1947”, Aspects of Bengali History and Society
(Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii, 1975, ed. Rachel
van M. Baumer).
‘Peasant Mobilization in Twentieth-Century Bengal”,
Forging Nations: A Comparative View of Rural Ferment
and Revolt (East Lansing, Michigan State University
Press, 1976, ed. Joseph Spielberg and Scott Whiteford).
‘The Rural Parvenu: A Report of Research in Progress”,
South Asian Review, Vol. VI, no. 3, April 1973.
 Abbreviations

Native Papers Report on Native Papers in Bengal (Calcutta,

Government of Bengal, weekly from 1876-)

PP Parliamentary Papers, Great Britain

.

; - .
 Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgements xi

Abbreviations xiii

1. The Regional Elites: A Theory of Modern

Indian History 1
Appendix A 15
2. The Partition of Bengal: A Problem in British
Administration, 1830-1912 26
3. A Plea for the Study of the Indian Provincial
Legislatures 41
4. The Vote and the Transfer of Power: A Study
of the Bengal General Election, 1912-1913 54
5. The Forgotten Majority: The Bengal Muslim
and September 1918 84
6. The Non-Cooperation Decision of 1920: A Crisis
in Bengal Politics 118
7. Four Lives: History as Biography 158
XVI CONTENTS

8. Gandhi: A Twentieth-Century Anomaly? 183

9. The Social and Institutional Bases of Politics

in Bengal, 1906-1947 197

10. Peasant Mobilization in Twentieth-Century

Bengal

Appendix B 215

11. The Rural Parvenu: A Report of Research in

Progress 240

Select Bibliography 259

 1

The Regional Elites:

A Theory of Modern Indian History

This paper will have served its purpose if it simply raises doubts
as to the validity of some of the generally accepted assumptions
underlying the interpretation of modern Indian history. It tries
to expose a few of the current cliches, and if, in the reader’s
opinion, it merely trades old cliches for new, then I hope the
resulting dissatisfaction will stimulate someone to offer fresh
ideas to vary the rather stale fare of Indian historiography. The
paper is full of grand subcontinental generalisations, but where
I have paused to illustrate my argument I have chosen evidence
from Bengal, which is my field of research.
1. One of the great social significances of the eighteenth
century in the Indian international sub-sys em, with its internal
political disorder and emerging power of the Europeans, was
the destruction of the pow'er of existing ruling groups. This was
effected not simply by military and political means, but also
through radical changes in such areas as trade, law, and land-
revenue assessment. It was accompanied for many of the dis¬
placed ruling groups by a loss of control over land.
2. At the same time large opportunities opened up in various
places in the international sub-system for those able to take
advantage of them. There were special opportunities in the
three initial areas of British intrusion, Bengal, Madras, and
2 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Maharashtra, and the groups which grasped those opportunities

became the elites in these societies in the nineteenth century.
3. The development of each of these elite groups was deter¬
mined by the following factors:
A. The Group's Experience before the British Intrusion audits
Situation at That Time. This largely determined what “cultural
baggage” the group carried with it into the new situation.
At this point 1 would question the utility of the commonly
used metaphor of a British impact on India, with its implication
of a dynamic force—expansive Europe—hitting a static object—
Indian society. I believe that we are better able to understand
the effects of the British intrusion if we take account of the
fact that the pattern of relationships among Indian elites was
subject to constant change in periods before the European
arrival, as much as in the period of European dominance. We
must recognise that in many areas, and certainly in the peri¬
pheral areas with which 1 am primarily concerned, there was
considerable social mobility in pre-European times. Certainly
the British presence affected the direction and possibly also the
speed of movement, most directly by providing new opportunities
for economic gain, but it is significant that the groups which took
advantage of these new opportunities did so very largely in terms
of their old methods of action.
To illustrate this let us look at Bengal. In that area before the
British arrival there was fairly extensive international trade,
considerable manufacturing in inland centres, and developed
administrative and judicial organisation in the Mughal province
and in the Hindu rajadoms, which occupied extensive areas of
Bakarganj and Chittagong districts in the east, and Bankura and
Burdwan districts in the west. Thus there were opportunities
for enterprise in administration, law or commerce which para¬
lleled those which were to be available after the British arrival,
and it appears to have been the same group which took advant¬
age of the opportunities in both periods. One see s in particular
the movement of Brahmins, Baidyas, and Kayasthas into the
service of the East India Company from similar service under
the Hindu rajas or in the Mughal system. They were able to
move in to the new system because they already possessed cer¬
tain skills: experience in administration and law; entrepreneurial
techniques and an accustomed readiness to work in an alien
THE REGIONAL ELITES 3

lingua franca (the talents of the dubash: the go-between); literacy,

and experience in using that literacy in the service of organ¬
isation. The group’s experience before the British intrusion and
its situation at that time, I said earlier, largely determined what
“cultural baggage” it carried with it into the new situation. In
the Bengal case, these skills were part of that baggage.
B. The Nature of the New Opportunities Offered. Just as the
experience and situation of the groups in the various regions
differed, so did the opportunities of which they were able to
take advantage.
For Bengal I would point in particular to the development of
Calcutta as the British capital in India; and the opportunity for
those who prospered in service to invest in landed property.
Access to land for the new administrative elite was provided
by the inequitable land revenue settlements of the period 1770 to
1790, the recognition by the law courts of the principle that land
was saleable to realize debt, and the command of the legal
system by the same group which had capital free for investment
as a result of its success in service. By investing in land in pre¬
ference to commerce, the elite revealed another piece of its
cultural baggage: its belief in the superior prestige and security
resulting from the possession of landed property.
C. The Manner in Which the Group Came to Terms with the
New Situation. There are a number of points to be noted here

i. some modus vivendi had to be reached with things

European, whether through total acceptance, a synthesis,
or rejection. I lump these three together for although
they appear to be fundamentally different they were all
possible responses to the European intrusion, and even
among those elite groups which were to benefit from the
opportunities almost the whole range of response was to
be found from individual members, or, perhaps more
significantly, from the group as a whole towards different
items of the intruders’ values. The range from total
acceptance at one end to rejection at the other should
be seen as a continuum. It is one of the unfortunate con¬
sequences of the impact on India metaphor that we have
generally concentrated our attention on one end of that
scale, where we have isolated a phenomenon which we
 4 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

have labelled “westernisation,” and in doing so have lost

sight of its integral relationship to the whole range of actual
response.
77. the fact is important that the groups which had been able
to grasp the opportunities and become elites were high
caste, with pride in their roles as guardians of great cultural
traditions.
As a consequence we see in all three regions—Bengal,
Madras, and Maharashtra—an articulate reconsideration
of the local cultural tradition and a concern with its
adaptation to the new intellectual situation. Each of the
elites developed a new and distinct cultural synthesis, draw¬
ing in part upon European ideas but drawing as well upon
their past experience.
Hi. the elite had not only to look upward to the Europeans
and European culture, it had also to look downward to
the lower strata of its own society, and work out for the
new situation new relationships with them. Again the
proud caste status of the elites was important. In Bengal,
where there was a running discuss on throughout the nine¬
teenth century on the proper ordering of society, the elites
justified their social dominance, at least to their own satis¬
faction, by a definition of their position which nicely com¬
bined their ascriptive caste ascendancy with their achieve¬
ment. They called themselves b'aadralok: the respectable
people. Bhadralok was almost synonymous with high caste-
Brahmin, Baidya, and Kayastha—but not quite, for this
was an open not a closed status group.1 A British govern¬
ment report of 1915 correctly, if rather tactlessly, descri¬
bed Bengali society as “a despotism of caste, tempered by
matriculation.”2 “The school,” wrote the Government of
Bengal on another occasion, “is the one gate on the society
of bhadralok,”3 Education, especially English-language
T have accepted here Max Weber’s definition of status group, and
his distinction between open and closed status groups. See H.H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (ed .), From Max Weber; Essays in Sociology (New
York, 1958), p. 405.
•Bengal District Administration Committee, 1913-1914 Report,
(Calcutta, 1915), p; 176.
3Report cf the Indian Statutory Commission, (London, 1930), vol. III,.
“Memorandum of the Government of Bengal,” p. 24.
 THE REGIONAL ELITES 5

education, professional and clerical employment, and the

literate culture to which that education gave access, as well
as the acceptance of high-caste proscriptions, were the
measures of bhadralok status.
The bhadralok’s role was to lead. In their eyes it was as
proper that they should be the political class, that they
should dominate the learned professions, that they should
control the institutions of education, and that they should
provide Bengal with its music, art and literature, as that
they should be accorded honour in village and town as the
respectable people. They were benevolent in their attitude
to the lower orders, but it was as often a benevolent
disdain as a benevolent paternalism.

4. Involved for each group in the process of coming to terms

with the new situation was the process of forming a new
identity.4 This new identity found its expression in distinct
interpretations of the past, in distinct cultural values, in distinct
styles of life, in attitudes distinct as to the proper organisation of
society, in distinct institutions, and in the distinct use of language.
Distinct, that is to say, from other groups within the regional
societies as also from the elites in other regions.
My last point, the distinct use of language needs no labour¬
ing. A moment's reflection will remind you of the role which
the elites played in the nineteenth-century development of
Bengali, Tamil, and Maharathi, and the immense significance
to them of these achievements. I will select one other item from
the Bengal experience further to illustrate my point: the bhad¬
ralok’s distinct view of the past. By the 1880s and certainly by
the time of Vivekananda’s evangelism, the bhadralok had a
generally accepted interpretation of their history which not only
explained the foreign conquest of Bengal, but gave a sanction
to the cultural division between elite and non-elite in the

4J define group identity in this way: A group with identity has agreed
values, understood internal relationships, accepted roles for various
members at developing stages of life, a language and channels of
communication, a shared interpretation of the past and hopes for the
future, common heroes, common symbols, and common myths. The
members of such a group are aware of their membership, and the group
is identifiable by other groups and individuals in the society.
 6 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

society, and provided direction for future bhadralok action.

Bengal once strong in the classical age, it was said, had been
emasculated by the quietist doctrines of Buddhism and the
emotional popular cults of medieval Hinduism. The “true
Brahmanical virtues” of intellectual initiative and rational self-
assertion had been neglected, and the degradation of the
Muslim conquest was a natural consequence. “Let us think for
a moment of the fatal and universal weakness which had beset
our people when the English first came to this land,” Chitta-
ranjan Das exhorted his fellow Bengal Congressmen in 1917.
“Our Religion of Power—the Gospel of‘Sakti’—had become a
mockery of its former self; it had lost its soul of beneficence in
the “petition of empty formulas and the observance of meaning¬
less mummeries.. . . The Hindus of Bengal had lost strength and
vigour alike in Religion, Science, and Life.”5 To Das, as to
other bhadralok of his own and the preceding generation, it
was self-evident that it was their ordained mission, as Bengal’s
culture elite, to restore the glory of Bengal through strength in
action. This interpretation of the past, with its implicit doctrine
of elite action, as effectually separated the bhadralok from the
mass of their fellow Bengalis, whether Muslims or Vaisnava
Hindus, as it did from the Madrasi and Maharashtrian elites,
whose historical reinterpretations were concerned with other
places and directed to other problems.
Taking a general view of this process of identity formation it
is important to note:

a. the intense emotional attachment of the elite to each of

the channels of expression of their new identity.
b. the complexity and sophistication of these forms of
expression. This fact has been badly played down,
largely it seems as a consequence of that concept
“westernisation,” which implies cultural borrowing or
copying. Certainly these new Indian cultures were indeb¬
ted to Europe, just as Europe in an earlier age had been
indebted to western Islam, but they were not carbon

‘“Bengal and the Bengalees”, Presidential Address, Bengal Provin¬

cial Conference, Calcutta, April 1917. Rajen Sen ed.: Deshbandhu
Chittaranjan Das. Life and Speeches, (Calcutta, 1926), p. 11.
THE REGIONAL ELITES 7

copies—black, smudged, imperfect reproductions of an

exotic original. They were themselves originals; distinct
cultures with fairly complex institutional structures by
the end of the nineteenth century.
c. that they were regionally developed and regionally
distinct.

5. The elites had social power but as subject people of a

foreign imperialism they did not have satisfactory political
power.
As a qualification to this statement, it is important to realise
(as neither of the “classical schools of modern Indian history—
British or nationalist—appears to have done) that the Indian
elites did have some political power under the British. The
major reason for the common failure to recognise this fact is
that “politics” appears to have been defined too narrowly. As a
consequence of the classical schools’ exclusive concern with the
struggle between the nationalists and the British for control of
the state, “politics” and “nationalism” have usually been equat¬
ed, and “non-nationalist” politics, if not totally disregarded,
have been seen as “anti-nationalist.” The failure to take
account of the elites’ political power has been a source of
misinterpretation in a number of areas:

a. the British are incorrectly represented as having been free

agents in constitutional reconstruction.
b. British attempts to use constitutional reforms as a way to
change the power relationships between elites and counter¬
elites have been largely under-estimated and the conse¬
quent grave dangers to order have been overlooked.
c. the leaders of the political elites have not been given due
credit for the self-restraint and concern for the maintenance
of order which they usually displayed in the exercise of
their power. Nor conversely have the limitations imposed
upon them by the responsibilities of power been recognis¬
ed.
d. the contest between elites and counter-elites have normally
been seen as a contest for future power, not for the control
of present power.
8 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

With these qualifications in mind, we can turn to the primary

point that the elites did not have satisfactory political power. Seek¬
ing to be master of its own political future and as a further expres¬
sion of its dentity, each elite developed a nationalism. For this
the inspiration was European, most directly the struggles for unity
in Italy and Germany, and according to the European ideal the
nation to which it aspired was universal: the Indian nation. The
existence under British control of a centrally-organised state
called India was of equal importance in giving the elites a
supra-regional nationalist vision. In the process of establishing
hegemony over the subcontinent, the British had widened the
horizons of ambition for the coastal elites, making it feasible for
them to attempt an extension of their elite dominance beyond the
confines of their regions. India was an exciting concept for them
in the 1860s, and it was equally exciting for them in the eighties
to discover that this concept gave them common ground for
discussion with men elsewhere on the subcontinent, a discus¬
sion facilitated by the same alien lingua franca which had enabled
them to work effectively outride their home region.
They defined their nationalism universally but they acted
exclusively. Each elite, I have said, developed a nationalism as
a means of political fulfilment and as a further expression of its
identity. As with the other forms of expression many of the
manifestations of this nationalism were in practice local and
exclusive: regional institutions, regional leaders, regional langu¬
ages, regional symbols, regional heroes and myths, and regional
patriotism. In each case there was a passionate attachment to
the particular nationalism, and, where the elites met as at the
Indian National Congress sessions, the confident belief by each
group that it supplied the initiative and the leadership for Indian
nationalism.
This leads me to some general observations on our perception
of Indian nationalism. Most historians have now rejected the con¬
cept of Indian nationalism as a “monolith” —a solid, homogeonous
bloc in opposition to the British, committed unquestioningly to
one doctrine—but they have replaced that concept with another
which is almost as misleading. Many of them have depicted
Indian nationalism as some sort of “container” in which were
mixed more or less satisfactorily a variety of divergent views
and aspirations. So may Indian nationalism appear to the
1HE REGIONAL ELITES 9

detached observer floating above the affairs of the subcontinent

on the magic carpet of historical research. So too it has appear¬
ed even to those involved on some occasions when the propo¬
nents of divergent views and aspirations have stood toe to toe to
fight out points of disagreement.
Where the “container” concept is misleading is that it distracts
attention from the essential fact that for most of the time, for
most of the groups and individuals to whom nationalism was
important, it was and could be only one thing: what they percei¬
ved it to be. Most saw it as a “monolith” not as a “container.”
Many would be offended at the suggestion that it was or should
be a “container”. This explains why on many of the occasions
when events brought the proponents of divergent views face to
face, they regarded one another with amazement, disbelief, and
incomprehension, and sometimes angrily rejected the other’s
claim even to rank as a nationalist. Discomfort and anger in this
situation are understandable, for each individual concept of
nationalism had been formed in the image of a particular interpret¬
ation of the Indian past, and this particular view of history was
the core of each group’s sense of identity. It is this intimate
connection between identity and perception of nationalism which
explains the emotional involvement of groups—their emotional
vested interest—in the maintenance of their particular “mono¬
lithic” nationalism.
Because of these factors myths have assumed extraordinary
importance. To talk as many do of stripping away the mytho¬
logy surrounding Indian nationalism to uncover the realities, is
to overlook the fact that the myths are part of the reality,
frequently the most passionately defended part. Without a
healthy respect for the potency of mythology and a willingness to
give sympathetic attention to myth formation, the observer of
the tension between the Indian elites and their rivals will find
himself with little ability to comprehend what he sees. Much of
the action before him must appear to be shadow play, for much
of it will be the conflict of irreconcilable myths.
6. There are two points to be noted about timing in the
development of the elites:

a. the coastal elites did not develop at equal pace, for

example in politics the Tamil Brahmins lagged 20 odd
10 MOSTLY ABOUT BcNGAL

years behind the Bengal bhadralok; nor were the elites

which developed on the first beachheads of the British
invasion to remain the only elite groups,
b. the situation for the elites was never static. For instance,
their initial opportunities were extended as the British
marched up-country conquering more territory, and
members of the elites could follow with the baggage
train: Tamil Brahmins through southern and eastern India;
Maharashtrian Brahmins throughout the Deccan and into
northern India; the Bengal bhadralok into Orissa and
Assam, and right up the Gangetic valley. The result was
the establishment by each of the elites of colonies beyond
their regional frontiers, colonies of English-speaking men
who dominated the new professional life of the up-country
towns. Then came the contraction of these opportunities
with the growth of new regional elites in the hinterland,
and with challenges from aspiring counter-elities beneath
the old elites in their home regions. Changes in the
economy of the subcontinent had opened opportunities
for groups in new areas and for new groups in the old
areas. Again the timing was not uniform for all three old
elite groups, but each was faced at some stage by attacks
on its position at home and in its colonies up-country.

The result in Bengal was that by the 1890s the bhadralok were
faced with growing economic difficulties. What was already a
serious situation as a result of population growth which had
reduced the per capita income from landed rent holdings and
increased the pressure on that limited area of “white-collar”
employment which the bhadralok considered respectable,
was aggravated by job-competition from local Muslims and
low-caste Hindus, who were now acquiring English-language
education in small but significant numbers, and by the emer¬
gence throughout the towns of north India of new indigenous
educated groups, who demanded of the local Governments
the exclusion of “outsiders” from administrative employment.
The very fact that they now distinguished the Bengalis as
“outsiders” is in itself significant, indicating the development,
or at least a new expression, or regional consciousness.
 THE REGIONAL ELITES 11

7. For the old elites these challenges from without and with¬
in were both part of one crisis and the appearance of their inter¬
relation was enhanced by the fact that both the new up-country
elites and the aspiring counter-elites at home repudiated the
leadership of the old elites in the nationalist movement, scorn¬
fully pointing out the disparity between their universal protesta¬
tions and their exclusive actions, and declaring that they had
lost touch with the “Indian nation” because of their “Anglicisa-
tion.” They had gained their dominance through association
with the British, it was said, and were irrevocably committed to
the maintenance of the imperial structure, whether under British
control or their own. New leaders from newly emerging groups
were produced by the up-country areas, with new concepts of
nationalism and an appeal aimed at all the new aspiring groups.
Thus Gandhi, a banya lvom Gujarat, attempting to influence
Bengal politics in 1920 directed his appeal for a mass movement
to the Muslims and low-caste Hindus, the aspiring counter-elite
in Bengal.
The vulnerability of the old elites to criticism and the diffi¬
culty which they had in countering the influence of the new
nationalists points to a significant fact: that those administrative
and entrepreneurial skills which had carried them so successfully
into the British system, and which had become formal measures
of elite achievement as the new cultures were given structure in
the nineteenth century, were no longer of great advantage—if
indeed they were not of positive disadvantage—in the changed
political conditions of the twentieth century. The skills which
political leaders had to command if they were to be effective in
the new situation were those of brokerage and communication.
They had to be capable of articulating and aggregating interests,
of manipulating popular symbols and imagery to give expression
to wider political identities. The old elites were ill-fitted and
illinclined to perform these roles.
8. The connection between the two challenges to the old elites’
dominance—the challenges from up-country and at home—was
not in fact as close as it appeared to be, for the aspiring counter-
elites in the old areas did not readily accept the proferred leader¬
ship from outside or the proferred redefinition of nationalism.
They had their own definitions, and, as with the elites
they were trying to displace, the context of these definitions
12 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

was regional. The aspiring counter-elites valued the home

ground as much as did the old elites and were determined to
battle with them for its possession. In each of these areas, elite
and counter-elite became engaged in bitter in-fighting, and they
were left struggling on the periphery of a nationalist movement
which was henceforth directed from the new areas by a leader¬
ship which had far less regional commitment.
This suggests two points:

a. that in the old areas there were strong regional identifica¬

tions by the second decade of the twentieth century,
resulting from the development of complex social structures
with internal centres of power, status and wealth, the
control of which was keenly contested.
b. that similar regional identifications had not developed in
what I have called the new areas, and apparently as a
consequence the new nationalist leadership could act as
well as talk universally.

9. Looked at from one angle, the “universalist” nationalism

of the post-1920 leadership can be understood as a result of the
development of nationalist sentiment among more sections of
society in widespread areas of the subcontinent, who could
respond to attacks on the regional and exclusive disposition of
the old elites. This does not, however, explain how the new
leadership could define their nationalism universally, nor how
they could escape primary involvement in regional affairs. For
that explanation I believe we must look at the character of the
three areas which supplied most of the nationalist leadership
from the twenties into the early sixties: the U.P., Bihar and
Gujarat.
I see four reasons for Gujarat's production of “universalist”
nationalists:

a. the Maharashtrian elite had previously dominated the

institutions of this area of Bombay province, as they had
all other areas outside Bombay city.
b. Gujarati families with political ambitions could satisfy
those ambitions in the service of the native states which
were thick on the ground in this area. It is significant, I
THE REGIONAL ELITES 13

think, that Gandhi’s family was in this line of business.

c. the splintering of Gujarat between the native states and a
conglomerate British Indian province like Bombay, with
its cosmopolitan coastal capital discouraged the develop¬
ment of regional consciousness.
d. the banyas who became so prominent in the Gujarati
Congress had a supra-regional culture (Vaisnavism-Jainism)
and most had family connections throughout India’s
trading centres.

Bihar is a comparable case:

a. this was a “colonial” area for the Bengal bhadralok into

the first decade of this century and an indigenous elite had
difficulty in raising its head as a consequence.
c. Bihar was but one part of a wider cultural and linguistic
region, embracing the U.P., Delhi and sections of the
Punjab, Rajputana and Central India. Most important,
for the U P. as well as Bihar, this was the seat of the
classical Indian imperial tradition. If the idea of a univer¬
sal India had any historic home this was surely it.

There are special and particularly interesting features in the

U.P. case. Here, it appears, the continued dominance of the
great landholders from the Mughal into the British period, as a
result of the protective policy of the “Oudh School,” prevented
the rise of an elite of the Bengal Maharashtrian variety. The
great landholders, with their Indo-Persian “husk culture” (as
Anthony Low has called it), their social dominance, and their
control of political institutions, were in fact the elite at least
until the 1920s, and those who challenged them could best do
so through that universalist and “anti-dominant” nationalism of
the new elites and counter-elites. The Nehrus, Tandon, Kidwai
and their ilk, in shaking themselves off the coattails of the great
landholders could use local discontents to advantage (viz., their
use of the kisans) but they were not embarrassed by detailed
regional commitments.
10. The effect of this extra-regional stance on the part of the
nationalist opponents of the great landholders were to leave the
U.P. without one clearly dominant group as the power of those
14 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

landholders declined in the 1930s. The regional struggles from

the late thirties to the present have been concerned as much
with the contest between rival caste and class groups over the
redistribution of power, as with the task of wresting that power
from the great landholders.
In Maharashtra and Tamilnad new, relatively stable counter¬
elites were firmly in power by the 50s. In West Bengal the
partition had allowed the bhadralok to reassert themselves in a
remnant of their former domain. But in the U.P. no one clearly
dominant elite has yet emerged. The struggle goes on and the
political bosses of Congress balance dexterously but dangerous¬
ly on the rolling balls of the struggle.
THE REGIONAL ELITES 15

Appendix A
To Chapter 1

Paul Brass, September 17, 1964

p

To get to the substance of your first letter, let me see if I

can state in a few sentences your premises and arguments. It
seems to me that you start with the argument that, under
British rule, elite social groups were formed, the members of
which lacked political power. These elite groups sought both
political power and an identity; both desires found expression
in nationalism. Although the members of these groups thought
they were Indian nationalists, actually their nationalism had a
very large regional content. In the coastal areas, new aspirant
elite groups arose to contest the leadership of the old elites, but
they shared the regional preoccupations of the groups they
were trying to replace. A new, universalistic nationalism arose
in the hinterland areas primarily for reasons peculiar to each
region.
I definitely agree with your perspective on the regions of
India and with your view that the way nationalism developed in
India varied from region to region because of forces operating
within each region. However, it does not seem to me always
possible to relate the kind of ideology of nationalism which
developed in each region to the kind of elite competition that
you describe. That is, I don’t dispute the validity of your
16 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

description for the coastal areas. Where I differ (and I realize that
you were hesitant on these points) is in the idea in point 9, of
your earlier statement that unique, regional factors which arose
in the modern period explain the development of a universalistic
nationalism in the hinterland areas. I don't know a thing
about Gujarat, but it seems to me that there are deeper histo¬
rical reasons for the development of a broader nationalism in
U.P. than elsewhere. I think the reasons for the all-India
nationalism of U.P. leaders are, first, that U.P. lies in an area
which has always been part of the imperial traditions in India*
and, second, because the language and culture of U.P. are
clearly supra-regional. To assert their identity, Bengalis, Tamils,,
and Maharashtrians must insist on their separateness. People
in the Hindi-speaking areas have gone through the same search
for identity, but they do not need territorial separateness to
express it. Rather, they express their identity by saying that their
view of India and of Indian nationalism is the real one. They
assert the greatness of their language and culture by identifying
it with that of all India, rather than by declaring their
separateness.
I think that there was, in every region of India, a distinction
between secular nationalists and “cultural nationalists” or
“revivalists.” U.P. produced both Nehru and Tandon. Your
definition of “universalist nationalism” would include both of
them. However, I think they must be separated because they
represent both two nationalisms and two different kinds of
social backgrounds. The Nehrus came from a synthetic cultural
backgrounds, which included both membership in the Kashmiri
Brahman community and service in the Moghul administration.
Tandon, as his biography says, came from “a respected Khatri
family,” a very big difference. Interestingly enough, it was not
the Nehrus who started the fight against the landlords, but
Tandon. Frankly, 1 don’t think that the fight against the land¬
lords had very much to do with the kind of nationalist ideology
which developed in U.P., except that it focused attention on
economic rather than cultural issues. Anyway, the Nehrus
were really exceptional. A small band of truly secular nationa¬
lists developed in U.P. under the leadership of Rafi Ahmad
Kidwai. However, the predominant form of nationalism in U.P.
has been the cultural nationalism of Tandon and the Jan Sangh*
THE REGIONAL ELITES 17

which might be described as “great Hindi chauvinism.” It was

suppressed in the U.P. Congress after the resignation of Tandon
in 1951, but it has been kept alive by opposition leaders and
is still latent among many Congressmen.
Nevertheless, the Congress in U.P., thanks to Nehru, still
stands for secular nationalism, even though some Congressmen
may be Hindu-Hindi chauvinists at heart. The elite that runs
the Congress comes from the high caste (Brahman and Thakur
largely) ex-tenants of the big landlords and from the petty
zamindars in the countryside and from the middle class of pro¬
fessional people, educators, merchants, and tradesmen in the
towns. The language of conflict in U.P. (that is, when conflict
is not purely factional or personal) revolves around both eco¬
nomic and cultural-communal issues. I think that economic
issues predominate now and that they will continue to do so
and I think this is good for the maintenance of the secular
nationalist tradition in U P.
To sum up what I’m saying: I want to add on to the question
of regionalism-nationalism the question of secular, economic
nationalism versus cultural-communal nationalism; it strikes
me that this division exists in all regions in India; different
nationalist attitudes arise in different regions when the cultural-
communal nationalists become strong. What Nehru wanted
was to drop these cultural issues altogether and to focus on the
issues of economic development. Of course, economic devel¬
opment raises regional issues of another kind, but that is
another matter.

John Broomfield, September 24, 1964

Paul, I’m in wholehearted agreement with your points about

the supra-regional character of the language, culture and
Imperial heritage of the U.P. This is a point I had overlooked
and I think it is crucial to an understanding of the ability of
the U.P. wallahs to find their identity in ‘India’ rather than
their region. I think the same argument applies to Bihar does
it not? I’ve been doing quite a lot of thinking about Gujarat
since I first constructed my edifice, and I can now offer the
following hypotheses for the appearance of ‘universalist’
nationalism there: 1. that Gujerat was a ‘colonial’ area for the
18 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Maharashtrian brahmins until perhaps the second decade of this

century and an indigenous elite had difficulty in raising its head as
a consequence. My analogies would be with the Bengali bhadra-
lok in Bihar and Orissa, and the Tamil brahmins in Andhra;
2. that families with political ambitions in Gujerat in the
nineteenth century could realize those ambitions in the service
of the native states, which were thick on the ground in this
region. It is significant, I think, that Gandhi’s family was in
this line of business; 3. that the culture from which the Gujerati
nationalists came, was as supra-regional as that of the U.P.:
Vaisnavite/Jain.
This leads me to a point of disagreement with you. As I
have suggested in these three points on Gujerat, I don’t think
that the existence in any region of a supra-regional culture
need be taken as the only factor influencing the development
of ‘universalist’ nationalism there. The particularities of the
region’s social structure and political development may still
be of significance, and this 1 think was the case in the U.P. It
does seem to me important that the great landholders retained
suchpower in this region under the umbrella of the Oudh School
and I am unconvinced that this did not affect the form of
nationalism developed in the U.P. As an argument against the
straight correlation of supra-regional culture with universalist
political expression, I would point to the U.P. great landholders
themselves. They were definitely in the Indian Imperial tradi¬
tion, with the language and culture of the wider ‘India’, but
their politics were downright exclusive and parochial. I still
think that the U.P. nationalists formed themselves, to a degree
at least, in the inverse image of these landholders.
It was from this point that 1 led on to the last paragraph of
my outline (# 10), and your letter left me uncertain as to what
you thought °f that paragraph. If I interpret your letter correct¬
ly you are saying that a universalist nationalism developed in
the U.P., but that there were bitter debates within that univer¬
salist nationalism between the secular nationalists and the
cultural nationalists. Further that fights on issues important
to these two groups are still the big fights in U.P. politics
today. If I have got this right, am I then right in thinking that
you disagree with my proposition in paragraph 10 that the
U.P. is unlike the peripheral areas (West Bengal, Madras and
THE REGIONAL ELITES 19

Maharashtra) which have stable dominant elites? Are you

saying that the struggle between social groups, or, alternatively,
the need to balance a number of equally strong social groups,
is not a significant factor in U.P. politics?
Gene [Eugene Irschick] has made two or three points which
I thought I might pass on to you. In relation to the development
of the ‘coastal’ elites, he has drawn attention to the immense
significance of the urban centers: Calcutta, Madras city, Poona/
Bombay: and to the related importance of the three great
universities: Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. In relation to the
question of timing, he has pointed out that for the Tamil
brahmins the challenge from the counter-elite at home (Non¬
brahmins) came before the challenge from up-country elites
(e.g. Telugu people). The Non-Brahmin trouble coming in the
middle of the second decade, and the Telugu people not getting
really “ugly” until the 1930s. This is unlike the Bengali
experience, where the up-country trouble came first (from the
Punjab and U.P. by the 1890s) and the home trouble came later
(in the second and third decades of this century).

Robert Crane, November 27, 1964

The last paragraph of page 1 of John Broomfield’s note of

July 20: “Nearly all saw it [nationalism] as a ‘monolith’, not as a
‘container’.” But we know of leaders who did see it as a move¬
ment which could ‘contain’ varied interests and objectives.
“Nearly all would be offended at the suggestion that it was or
should be a ‘container’.”
None the less, I feel that it was an imperative that an effec¬
tive Indian nationalism had to subsume, or contain, in its
‘ranks’, a variety of interests and attitudes and responses, even
while they jockeyed for control. A relevant part of the dyna¬
mics of development of Indian nationalism was the tension
between groups or ideologies and it is necessary to trace out
the struggles through which an articulation of diverse aims
came to be more or less effectively achieved. I would also argue
that the British presence prodded the various ‘groups’ within
nationalism to seek such accommodation so as to become an
effective and adequately ‘unified’ movement. If there had been
no foreign rule, I suspect there would have been all too little
 20 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

reason for the development of an Indian nationalism. But,

foreign rule caused a variety of Indian interests and groupings
to ‘need’ to coalesce. This, given the existing situation, meant a
search for unity in a movement which could subsume, in its
larger ranks, the desires and goals of regional or social or eco¬
nomic elites. Gandhi, I suppose, represents the expression of
the need to ‘bury the hatchet’ so as to get on with the task at
hand. He surely tried to forge a nationalism around which
most Indians could unite, i.e. to contain a wide variety of
nationalist groups and leaders.
“as subject people of a foreign imperialism they did not
have political power.”
They had a form of political power in so far as they ‘media¬
ted’ between the Raj and the Indian. As middlemen they had a
lot of more or less subtle economic and ‘political’ power.
“they were left struggling on the periphery of the nationalist
movement.”
Not necessarily. The struggle could be part of a moving
equilibrium and a new balance, hence allowing the continuity
which John rightly emphasises earlier in the paper.
“the new leadership could define their nationalism universal¬
ly and could escape primary involvement in regional affairs.”
Tends to miss the point that the search for validation based
upon mass support enhanced the power of universal symbols.
As a general comment, John, I would say that you throw
baby out with bath. The nine pages pretty much overlook the
role of the British. But, it was against the British foil that each
region and its proto-elites had to develop. The Raj set many
of the ‘ground-rules’ within which the various elites and counter¬
elites had to struggle. It is precisely in the interaction between
the Raj—in its various manifestations—and the regional elites
and emerging elites that we must look for an important
‘engine’ for the dynamics of development. The Raj played a
number of roles in various areas and in various periods which
affected the position and interests and stance of the emergent
and rival sub-elites. This comment does not deny the validity
of the hypotheses advanced in this mimeo panel discussion, but
it does insist upon the relevance of the British impact, both in
its positive and in its negative sense, for the emergence and
transformation of the various regional settings. At each point
THE REGIONAL ELITES 21

in the specific cases I have studied it has struck me that it was

the local manifestation of the British presence—in interaction—
which set the stage for the internal dialogue belween the vari¬
ous contestant parties.
By the way, I am not impressed by the present formulation
of the ‘causes’ of the universal nationalist setting. I think it
needs more detailed study, and more attention to the develop¬
ment of‘universal’ grievances as British rule spread its ‘conse¬
quences’ more widely and bit more deeply into larger segments
of Indian society. I fear you have inadvertently assumed a
static British impact in lieu of a static native society. My ‘indi¬
genous’ sources tell me the Indians were always responding to
British ‘inputs’ in terms of their own distinctive regional tradi¬
tions, interests, and preoccupations until it became more impor¬
tant to respond to the general British challenge in a universal
manner.

Bernard Cohn, December 28, 1964

I have little to add of intellectual substance to the working

document, other than to raise questions about the two major
concepts—“region” and “elite”.

(a) Region: Substantively three kinds of regions are

discussed.

(1) Bengal, Tamilnad, Maharashtra. In each of these

there was a group with a self-consciousness of
regional identity (Chitpavans in Maharashtra?),
Brahmins in Tamilnad, Bhadralok in Bengal. On
the surface, each one of these groups in origin and
structure is very different. The Chitpavans seem the
most coherently organized from a sociological point
of view, common traditions, endogamous, diagnostic
customs and linguistic habits (e.g., their Kanbani
accent). The Bhadralok are of the nature of a cate¬
gory not a group. The Brahmins of Tamilnad are
more like the Bhadralok than the Chitpavans.

What are the characteristics of these three regions:

22 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

(a) Linguistic
(b) Cultural/historical
(c) Political (fits mainly Maharashtra)
(d) The belief or myth in the 19th and 20th centuries
on the part of “elites” that they are regions.

It seems tome that “d” is the significant characteristic.

(2) U.P. From the discussion, I gather the feeling that

U.P. is a non-region. It has none of the charac¬
teristics of type 1. The fact that U.P. is a non-region
comes out strongly in Brass’ dissertation. Another
factor is the complexity of elites historically and
contemporaneously in the area. Paul’s use of
Tandon and the Nehrus as symbols is interesting. In
a very real sense, U.P. had a pre-modern cosmopo¬
litan culture among its elites; in a way I don’t think
other regions have. This is Anthony Low’s “Indo-
Persian ‘husk culture’.” This culture was found in
most cities in the 18th century including Bombay,
Poona, Calcutta and Hyderabad in the south. So
that in a real sense, U.P.’s “elite” was a “national”
elite in the 18th and early 19th century; and very
different from the elites of Bengal, Tamilnad and
Maharashtra, in that they did not conceive of them¬
selves as part of a region, with a self-conscious past
regionally defined. Since the elite was national in
its orientation, they did not develop a regional
consciousness.
(3) The latent regions. If Bengal, Tamilnad and
Maharashtra are clearly regions with a regional elite
and U.P. is a “non-region” with a national elite,
there were in the 19th century latent regions in a
cultural sense. I would say the Punjab and Rajasthan
are examples of latent regions which do not develop
regional character until the mid-20th century.

(b) The definition of “elite”.

In a hierarchical complex society, someone always has

 THE REGIONAL ELITES 23

“social power”. I think they (that is the elites) always

had even under Imperialism political power as well. In
the sense that they could get people to do what was
wanted, even the British. The question is why did some
elites take to the style of nationalistic political activity
and others didn’t. Why did some turn to regional
politics, others national, still others commercial or
educational affairs. I don’t think the use of the concept
should only be restricted to those who went into politics
in an overt organized way. What is needed is an analysis
of relationships within regions and on the national
scene of different kinds of elites.

John Broomfield, January 1, 1965

In conversation O.P. Goyal (Chandigarh political scientist

who is visiting Michigan for the year) raised a number of
points which are pertinent to Barney’s comments. He too
asked for my criteria in the selection of elites and regions, and
looking back over my notes it was apparent to us that I had
restricted my attention to those elites in British India which (to
use Barney’s words) ‘went into politics in an overt organized
way.” Goyal pointed out that this excluded the political elites
in the princely states, who played a distinct and important role
during the transfer of power, and in some areas emerged as a
significant element in state politics after integration (as did for
example the PEPSU group in Punjab politics).
He pointed to contrasts in the roles which the elites can play:

a. some regional elites can also play the role of national

elites (e.g. those of the U.P. and Bihar);
b. some regional elites in becoming national elites cease to
be regional elites (e.g. Tamil brahmins and some Maha¬
rashtrian brahmins);
c. some elites can only play the role of national elites (e.g.
Marwaris and other business groups).

Reinforcing Paul’s and Barney’s points about the identification

of U.P. wallahs with India or the whole Hindi-speaking area
rather than the state of U.P., Goyal drew attention to the
24 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

contrast between men from the Hindi- and Punjabi-speaking

areas of the Punjab, the latter playing a far more active role in
regional politics and the former identifying to a greater extent
with national affairs. He believes that a number of structural
factors encourage ambitious men from the Hindi areas to turn
to national politics. Among them:

a. the location of the capital of India;

b. the very large representation in the Lok Sabha from the
populous Hindi states, which provides big opportunities
for power fora Hindi-speaking politician who concentrates
on the Center.

In this connection he points to the interaction between factions

in national politics and factions in U.P. politics. All of which
seems to me to lend support to Barney’s and Paul’s character¬
isation of the U.P. as a ‘non-region’.
Fuither thoughts of my own. I did not intend to throw
‘baby out with bath’ and am glad Bob Crane emphasised the
dynamic and varied role of the British. I would take advantage
of this point to amend my original comment on nationalism to
read: “For this the inspiration was European, and also accord¬
ing to the European ideal the nation to which it aspired was
universal: the Indian nation.” Certainly the struggles for Italian
and German unity were models which directly influenced the
early nationalist thinking of the Indian political elites. “(Mazzini
had taught Italian unity. We wanted Indian unity.”
Surendranath Benerjea: A Nation in Making, p. 43.) But the
existence under British control of a centralised state called
India was obviously of equal importance in giving the elites a
supra-regional nationalist ambition. For India at least, Lord
Acton’s dictum seems to hold true: “The nation is not the
cause, but the result, of the State. It is the State which creates
the nation, not the nation the state.”
I would underline the point made by both Bob and Barney
that the elites did have political power under the British. The
failure by both ‘classical’ schools of modern Indian history—
British and nationalist—to recognise this fact, has led to mis¬
interpretation in a number of areas:
THE REGIONAL ELITES 25

1. the British are incorrectly represented as having been

free agents in constitutional reconstruction;
2. British attempts to use constitutional reform as a way to
change the power relationships between elites and counter-
elites has been largely underestimated and the consequent
grave dangers to order have been overlooked. (I can
trace direct connections, for instance, between the British
constitutional‘fiddling’in Bengal from 1917 to 1921, to
disadvantage the bhadralok in favor of the Muslims, and
the disastrous communal rioting in 1926);
3. the leaders of the political elites have not been given due
credit for the self-restraint and concern for the mainten¬
ance of order which they usually displayed in the exer¬
cise of their power. Nor conversely have the limitations
imposed upon them by the responsibilities of power been
recognised;
4. the contest between elites and counter-elites has normally
been seen as a contest for future power not for the control
of present power.

A major reason for this failure to recognise that the elites had
political power under the British is that‘politics’appears to
have been defined too narrowly. Again a consequence of the
classical schools’ exclusive concern with the struggle between
the Indian nationalists and the British for control of the state.
Even Muslim or Tamil non-brahmin communalism has frequent¬
ly been seen simply as anti-nationalism. I think we should be
careful in our discussion of the elites to avoid this equation of
politics with nationalism—an equation which my highly-con¬
densed first outline may have appeared to make.
 2

The Partition of Bengal:

A Problem in British Administration,
1830-1912

Why was Bengal partitioned in 1905 and repartitioned in

1912? This is a question which has engaged Indian historians,
particularly Bengalis, in recent years. I should like to approach
the enquiry from a different angle. Why, I should like to ask,
was it in 1905 and 1912 that Bengal was partitioned, and not,
for argument’s sake, in 1895 or 1875? This is a pertinent ques¬
tion, for Bengal had been a problem to the British Government
in India for more than 80 years before Lord Curzon took his
fateful decision in 1903. There had certainly been earlier
attempts to grapple with the problem, but it was not until the
first decade of the twentieth century that anyone ventured to
grasp it firmly. The aim of this paper is to suggest some of the
reasons why a decision was so long delayed, and why it was
taken when it was. I must emphasise that I can offer no more
than suggestions, for this aspect of the Partition of Bengal
awaits detailed investigation. I am convinced that such an
investigation would provide answers that are at present being
sought elsewhere.
It will have been observed that the subtitle to the paper is “a
problem in British Administration”. It is important to realise
that, to the Biitish Government in India, Bengal presented a
 THE PARTITION OF BENGAL 27

knotty administrative problem throughout most of the nine¬

teenth century. This area first came under British control after
the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764). In 1765 Emperor
Shah Alam was induced to grant to the East India Company the
Diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, but it was not until 1772,
when Warren Hastings became Governor, that the Company
took direct control. Two years later Hastings became Governor-
General, with some authority over Madras and Bombay, and
immediate responsibility for Bengal. Each addition to the
Company’s territories in northern India saw the expansion of
the boundaries of Bengal, and by 1826 the Presidency extended
well beyond Delhi in the west, and into the Valley of Assam in
the east. The stage was set for a play that ran for more than 80
years ending in grim tragedy. Bengal was too large for its
Government—either it had to be reduced in size, or its Govern¬
ment had to be reconstructed. These, we shall find, were the
alternatives with which the British worked throughout the
century.
The first move was territorial: in 1836 the Presidency was
divided, a separate Lieutenant-Governorship of the North-
Western Provinces, extending from the Bihar frontier to the
Sutlej, being created. This was followed by the reform of the
Bengal Government. In 1843 a provincial secretariat was estab¬
lished, and in 1854 the Governor-General was provided with a
subordinate to relieve him of immediate responsibility for Bengal.
The charge of the new Lieutenant-Governor was considerable.
It comprised Bengal proper, Bihar, Orissa, Assam, Arakan,
Chota Nagpur, and tributary states, with a total area of approxi¬
mately 253,000 square miles.1 This may be compared with the
area of the present state of West Bengal, viz. 33,928 square
miles. The population was estimated at the time at 40 millions
but it may have been ten nvllions more. That of Calcutta was
probably between four and five hundred thousand.2

1Report on the Administration of Public Affairs in the Bengal Presid¬

ency 1855-56 (Calcutta, 1856) p. 1.
2See C.E. Buck'.and: Bengal Under the Lieutenant-Governors, 1854-
1898 (Calcutta, 1901) vol I, p. 5; Kingsley Davis: The Population of
India and Pakistan (Princeton, 1951) p. 132; J.F. Baness: Index Geogra-
phicus Indicus (London, 1881) pp. 9, 53 & 61; Imperial Gazetteer
of India (London, 1907-9, vol. VII, pp. 222-6.
28 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The Government of Bengal at this time differed in a number

of important respects from the Governments of Bombay and
Madras, the two other Presidencies. They were headed by full
Governors, men selected from English public life who might
communicate directly with the Board of Control in England, and
who were assisted by Executive Councils. The Lieutenant-
Governor of Bengal, a Civilian, governed alone, and was respon¬
sible, in the first instance, to the Governor-General. This position,
though apparently anomalous in view the importance of the
province, may be understood if it is remembered that the
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal was only one of two Lieutenant-
Governors in the Presidency, and that his capital was also that
of the Governor-General, but it placed the Government of
Bengal in a peculiar relationship to the Government of India
throughout the period under review. The two were so intimately
associated, and the Imperial establishment so overshadowed
the provincial, that there was little hope that suggestions for
major reforms in Bengal would be judged primarily in terms of
local needs.
The history of the Bengal Administration in the half-century
after 1854 reveals three great watersheds: the mutiny of 1857;
the Orissa Famine of 1866-67; and the latter years of Lord
Curzon’s Viceroyalty, 1902-5. The Mutiny precipitated
reforms which had long been under consideration. There was,
of course, the fundamental change effected by the Crown’s
assumption of direct control of India in 1858. This was followed
immediately by the codification of Indian law, and in Bengal by
a reform of the judiciary. The Lieutenant-Governor was given
powers of legislation and a council to assist him in their exer¬
cise, while the lower administration in the province was brought
into line with the greater part of British India by the union
of the offices of Collector and Magistrate. Some attempt was
made to establish a system of local government, and there was
a reform of the police organisation. In addition, the Lieutenant-
Governorship was reduced in size by the transfer of Arakan to
the new Province of British Burma formed in 1862.
Arakan was neither populous nor important. Its transfer did
little to lighten the burden of the Bengal Government—and by
the 1860s the weight of that burden was crushing. The popula¬
tion of this huge and fertile region was increasing at the rate of
THE PARTITION OF BENGAL 29

some five hundred thousand a year, but its administration

remained virtually unchanged. The Government was fighting a
spirited but losing battle to meet the growing demands for its
services. This was revealed with stark clarity by the famine
which struck Orissa in 1866. The Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Cecil
Beadon, broken in health by the impossible demands of his.
office and served by an inadequate Administration, was unequal
to the colossal task of relief with which he was confronted.
Hundreds of thousands of people died, and the Secretary of
State and the Government of India awoke too late to a realisa¬
tion that all was not well with the constitution of Bengal.
The result was a full-scale enquiry into the Government and
Administration of the Province. Its scope was very wide, and
the minutes, memoranda and reports produced form a file of
extraordinary proportions.3 In terms of practical reforms, how¬
ever, the achievement was negligible. The blame for this lay
chiefly with the Secretary of State, Sir Stafford Northcote. Had
he laid proper emphasis upon the two questions which he
rightly regarded as fundamental—whether the province should
be divided, and whether its Lieutenant-Governor (or Governor)
should have the assistance of an Executive Council4—this excel¬
lent opportunity of solving the Bengal problem might not have
gone begging. The immediate need was for reforms in Bengal,
but Northcote allowed discussion to wander over every aspect
of Indian administration, and to dissipate itself in profitless
argument.
Exasperated by the resultant stalemate, Sir Bartle Frere,
ex-Governor of Bombay who had sat as a member of the
enquiry committee, wrote a masterly expose of the inadequacy
of Bengal’s administration. Analysing the number of civil
servants provided for the province, he said:

We find that for every five millions of people inhabiting

a country larger, richer, and more important in every way,
except fighting power, than most third class European sove¬
reignties, we have one-eighth of a Lieutenant-Governor, about

3The selection presented to Parliament ran to 151 printed folio pages_

P.P. 1867-68 (256) vol. XL.1X, pp. 161-311.
4See his memorandum dated 16 September, 1867, ibid., pp. 163-164.
 30 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

28| English gentlemen, Covenanted Civilians, and about

112 Uncovenanted gentlemen.
It must be borne in mind that these numbers comprise
the whole of the administrative machinery of this vast pro¬
vince, with the most trifling exceptions. The duties which
the great feudal chiefs perform in other parts of India, and
in most parts of Europe, or which the unpaid administration
performs in our own country, are not fulfilled by any class
in Bengal. . . .
With these facts before us, can we say that Bengal has any¬
thing but the shadow of an administration? Can we wonder
at a breakdown like that of Orissa? or that of the late
Lieutenant-Governor’s two predecessors? ... It is true that
of late years there has been a nibbling at improvement, both
in police and judicial administration; but what has been
attempted bears no proportion to the wants of the country,
and Bengal is still practically ungoverned for that is the long
and short of the Commission’s report on it, and all that we
have seen and heard during the late famine.5

Frere had the wholehearted support of the Lieutenant-

Governor, Sir William Grey, who declared that his Government
was the greatest anomaly existing in India. Bengal was the
largest and most important province, and should, in his opinion,
be at least on a par with Bombay and Madras. “I have no
hesitation in affirming, that at present the Lieutenant-Governor
of Bengal is overweighted, to an extent neither fair to the
individual nor (which is of more importance) to the interest of
the province, or rather provinces, which constitute the Lieute¬
nant Governorship,” he wrote.6 Five years later his successor,
John Campbell, was echoing his words. “It is totally impos¬
sible”, he declared, “that any man can properly perform single-
handed the work of this great Government.”7
Despite these eloquent appeals no major reform was under¬
taken. Assam was constituted a separate province, certainly, but
even this was delayed seven years, in spite of its recommendation

Memorandum dated 2 December 1867, ibid., pp., 204-205.

‘Grey to Sir John Lawrence, 6 July 1867, ibid., pp. 165-166.
7P.P., 1906 [Cd. 2746] vol. LXXXI, p. 637.
THE PARTITION OF BENGAL 31

by all connected with the famine enquiry. In addition,

another secretary was provided for the Bengal Government, but
the suggestion of an Executive Council to assist the Lieutenant-
Governor was shelved, in deference to the convictions of that
confirmed Punjab paternalist, the Governor-General Sir John
Lawrence, and his supporters, who held firmly to their belief that
council government was inferior to personal government. The
enquiry was of great importance in the history of Partition, none¬
theless, for it represented the first major attempt to grapple with
the Bengal problem. The file produced in 1867 was henceforth
the textbook on Bengal to which all referred.8
Sir Henry Durand, military member of the Viceroy’s council,
writing in that book of wisdom, observed that the problem was
not to be solved by administrative readjustments: “This top
dressing, so to speak, does not touch the root of the evil,” he
said.9 By the end of the century it was painfully clear that
Durand had been right. Since 1854 Bengal had been reduced
in area by nearly a quarter, but despite this its population had
risen from forty or fifty to almost eighty millions. It is asto¬
nishing to realise that that was well over a quarter of the popu¬
lation of the entire subcontinent.10 Add to this the immense
expansion in Governmental activity in the second half of the
nineteenth century,11 and some appreciation will be gained of
the colossal task confronting the Lieutenant-Governor. “Bengal
is unquestionably too large a charge for any single man”, wrote

’E.g. see Government of India to Secretary of State, 2 February

1905, ibid., pp. 638-41; Secretary of State to Government of India, 27
November 1908, P.P., 1908 [Cd. 4426] vol. LXXVI, Pt. 1, p. 52; Govern¬
ment of India to Secretary of State, 25 August 1911, P.P., 1911 [Cd.
5979] vol. LV, p. 588.
9Minute dated 27 February 1968, P.P., 1867-68 (256) vol. XLIX,
p. 247.
“Imperial Gazetteer, op. cit., vol. Vil, pp. 194 & 222-226.
11E.g. compare the lists of Government departments given in the
Reports on the Administration of Bengal, 1855-56 and 1904-05. In the
former year there were 14 departments, in the latter 30, including such
novelties as Legislation; Municipal Administration and Local Self-
Government; Forests; Manufactures, Mines, and Factories; Statistics;
Vaccination; and Veterinary Services. In the same period the total
revenue of the province had risen from Rs. 110,800,168 to Rs.
231 853,000. (Appendices to the Bengal Administration Report, 1858-
59, p. 78; Report on the Administration of Bengal, 1904-05, p. 102.)
32 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Curzon early in 1902.12 This statement had by then become a

cliche dishonoured by 70 years of official inaction. What
followed must therefore be regarded as remarkable. Within ten
years Bengal was twice partitioned; its Government was provid¬
ed with an Executive Council; the Lieutenant-Governor was
replaced by a Governor; and the capital of India was removed
from Calcutta to New Delhi.
The details of these developments are well known, and there¬
fore we can proceed to a consideration of the questions: why
was a solution to the Bengal problem so long delayed, and why
was it attempted in 1905? The answer to the first question is
the key to the second. It has been observed that the alterna¬
tives—the division of the province, or the expansion of its
Government—were understood by the British from the first.
Why was one or the other not applied? Firstly, it appears*
because there was a reluctance to share, or even on occasions,
to delegate, authority, and this extended right down the line
from Governor-General to District Officer. It may be pointed
out quite correctly, that this statement runs counter to the-
great bulk of writing on the I.C.S., but the evidence on Bengal
leaves the writer in no doubt as to its validity for that province
at least. The opposition of successive Governors-General and
their councillors to the provision of an Executive Council for
Bengal exemplifies it. A major reason for this was, undoubtedly,
the periodic disagreements between the Government of India
and the rather independent Governors and Executive Councils,
of Madras and Bombay, and (less frequently), between those
Governors and their Councils. The Government of India
argued, rather illogically, from this that a Governor (or Lieute¬
nant-Governor) was weakened by the delegation of power to
Councillors. In rejecting a Bengali suggestion in 1904 for a
reconstitution of Government rather than the partition of the
province, Curzon and his advisors declared that the idea of
giving the Lieutenant-Governor a Council “must be set aside
absolutely and without hesitation as a solution of the present
difficulty. . . personal methods of government are better

12Curzon to Lord George Hamilton, April 1902, Earl of Ronaldshayi

The Life of Lord Curzon (London, 1928) vol. II, p. 321.
 'IHE PAR IITION OF BENGAL
3a

suited to the circumstances of India, and produce superior

results.”13
The unwillingness to delegate authority is also reflected in
the relations between the Government of India and the Govern¬
ment of Bengal. In the discussions which followed the Orissa
tragedy, and in those which preceded the removal of the capital
to Delhi, it was generally agreed that the Government of India
pressed so heavily upon the Government of Bengal as at times
to render the latter a mere cypher.14 In 1863 the Governor-
General, John Lawrence, disagreed with this opinion, but pro¬
ceeded to give the lie to his argument by recommending the
abolition of the Bengal Legislative Council. The affairs of the
province could be adequately handled by the Imperial Council,
he declared, and the LieutenanCGovernor would be better
occupied as a member of that Council than in managing one of
his own.10 Curzon once complained that a sparrow could not
twitter its tail without this being attributed to direct orders
from the Viceroy.16 One may surely ask: “Whose fault-sparrow
or Viceroy?” It was typical of Curzon—and indeed of the
normal relations between the Governments of India and
Bengal—that it was he who made the tour of Eastern Bengal
in February 1904 to enlist support for Partition, and not the
Lieutenant-Governor, Sir Andrew Fraser. Why should not
his Government have been encouraged to handle this domestic
affair?
At the provincial level the failing is seen in the attitude to
Lord Ripon’s famous local self-government resolution of 1882.
Ripon was a notable exception to the rule, for he emphasised
the need to share the increased burdens of administration, and
drew attention to the growing number of educated Indians who
were willing and able to play their part. His work, however,
was frustrated by the opposition of provincial governments,
who had little desire to expand representative institutions. The

13Government of India to Secretary of State, 2 February 1905,

P.P., 1906 [Cd. 2746] vol. LXXXI, pp. 638-41. See also P.P., 1867-68
(256), XLIX, pp. 161-311; and Curzon to Hamilton, 28 January 1904,
Ronaldshay, op cit., p.324. • • -
“Government of India to Secretary of State, 25 August 1911,
P.P., 1911 [Cd. 5979] vol. LV, pp 582-588.
“Minute, 19 February 1868, P.P., 1867-68, (256) vol, XLIX, p. 227.
34 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

resolution was implemented in Bengal in 1884-5, but for the

rest of the century there were repeated attempts by that
Government to reduce the elected membership and curtail the
powers of local boards. This culminated in the notorious 1899
Calcutta Municipal Act, which returned the Corporation to the
control of Government nominees.
The District Officers also failed to make proper use of
representative boards. There was general agreement, e.g.,
among those who gave evidence to the Royal Commission on
Decentralisation in 1907-8, that these bodies had failed because
the District Officers had given them no say in determining
policy 17
It is important that we should ask why there was this failure
to make proper use of subordinates. One reason, it seems, was
the desire to preserve efficiency. The argument was that control
had to be kept in the hands of those whom one knew to be
capable. Carried to its extreme, this meant oneself. There are
indications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
of an “efficiency cult” in the I.C.S.: as long as Government was
efficient nothing else was thought to be of major importance.18
This is the ground on which many Conservative opponents to
the Morley-Minto reforms took their stand.19 To a degree it

16Ronaldshay, op. cit., p. 323.

l7Hugh Tinker: The Foundations of Local Self Government in India,
Pakistan and Burma (London, 1954) pp. 32-63.
18An article in Capital (Calcutta) 26 March 1914, pp. 747-8, exem¬
plifies this view: “The schemes for setting up advisory councils and other
frills of that kind look attractive enough on paper, but for administrative
purposes they are “not business” .... It is a case of amateur versus
expert administration, and our sympathy is with the expert.
Before new authorities are formed, we shall require proof that (1) the
present system shows a decline in efficiency; (2) that indigenous govern¬
ment is superior, or likely to be superior. We see no evidence of any
decline in the efficiency of the executive office's of Government, despite
the increasing complexity of their work, and we see much to make us
doubt whether they could be usefully supplanted by the gentlemen who
talk so much of public service and do so little to surround such service
with associations of honesty and efficiency . . . despite tub-thumping
assertions to the contrary, we still contend that it is administrative
efficiency which is India’s greatest need.”
l9E.g . see Bampfylde Fuller: “Qup Vadis? A Prospect in Indian
Pol tics”, Nineteenth Century and After, vol. LXV (London, Jan.-June
1909) pp. 711-726. . .
THE PARTITION OF BENGAL 35

was a confusion of means with ends.

The second reason that may be suggested for this unwilling¬
ness to share authority, and one which is linked with the first,.
was a tendency to govern for the sake of the Government, not
the governed. Too often in the discussion on the Bengal issue,.
both in 1867-8 and 1902-3, it seemed to be the convenience of
the Administration which was of primary importance. One of
the main purposes of the letter of 3 December 1903 in which*
the Government of India informed the Government of Bengal
of its plans for the province, was to warn the officials that they
must not think too exclusively in terms of their own losses or
gains from partition.20 That it was thought necessary to empha¬
sise this point surely indicates that Government for the sake of
the Government was a very real danger. “. . . there is a dead
wall of official resistance always ready to obstruct anything :
which can be twisted into meaning interference with British
official rights,” complained Lord Minto, when struggling
with opposition to his reform proposals a few years later.21
Here is an important clue to an understanding of the violent
Bengali hatred of Partition. The measure was pushed through
by the British in the name of administrative convenience against
unprecedented protest. The argument of administrative conve¬
nience was considered all sufficient, and opposition was charac¬
terised as ignorant or (more often) selfish and subversive.22 1
Bengal was shocked into the realisation that the British were
willing to perpetrate such measures—no matter how unpopular
—to benefit the Administration.
If the first reason for delay was a reluctance to delegate
authority, then the second was an aversion in the Civil Service
to major reforms, either territorial or Governmental. If the
status quo could be preserved, so much the better; if not, small
adjustments were to be preferred to a thorough-going revolution.
This explains that “nibbling at improvement” of which Frere
complained. To suggest any change was to court widespread
opposition. A territorial adjustment, for example, ran headlong

20P.P., 1905 [Cd. 2658] vol. LVIII, p. 204.

21Minto to his wife, 21 March 1907, Lady Minto: India, Minto and
Morley, 1905-1910 (London, 1935) p. 109.
22E.g. see Sir Andrew Fraser: Among Indian Rajahs and Ryots <
(London, 1911) pp. 319-324.
36 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

against vested interest, as was clearly shown in 1905. It was

proposed by the Government of India that Chcta Nagpur should
be transferred to the Central Provinces, but the Bengal Chamber
of Commerce was interested in its mining and industrial poten¬
tial, and successfully blocked the move. Similaily, deference
was shown to the tea industry in the choice of a name for the
new province. It was to have been called the “North-Eastern
Provinces” but it became “Eastern Bengal and Assam”; so that
Assam, known throughout the commercial world, would not
disappear from the map. The officials also had their objections.
It was the Government of Madras, for instance, which prevent¬
ed the union of the Uriya speaking people by refusing to
transfer to Bengal the Uriya areas under its control.23 It is
clear that provincial boundaries developed related interest groups
as much within the Civil Service as without, and in this respect
language was a most important factor. An ambitious Civilian
faced with a choice of vernaculars, would usually concentrate
upon mastering the language of the metropolis—to which he
hoped one day to be promoted—in preference to that of a
remote district. In Bengal this meant the neglect of areas such
as Orissa and Bihar.24 One of Curzon’s main arguments in
favour of the 1905 re-adjustment was that it offered a solution
to Assam’s perennial staffing problem, for civilians would be
more willing to serve in that province if it were united with
Eastern Bengal.20
Here is a key to an understir ding of the form of the
Partition. To the Administration it seemed important that a
Bengali-speaking area should be included in every new sub¬
division of the province, and hence its adamant rejection of
demands for linguistic union. This re-emphasises the weight
given to administrative as against popular convenience. Bengali

2'Secretary, Bengal Chamber of Commerce to Chief Secretary,

Government of Bengal, 19 Match 1904, P.P., 1906 [Cd. 2764] vol. LXXX1,
p. 704; Secretary of S’ate t ■> Government of India, 9 June 1905, ibid.,
p. 876; Government of India resolution dated 19 July 1903, P.P., 1905
[Cd. 2658] vol LVIII, pp. 215-217.
2JOn Orissa see F.G. Bailey: “Politics in Orissa”, Economic Weekly,
vol. XI, 1959, nos. 35 & 37-45; and Caste and the Economic Frontier
(Manchester, 1957).
25Govemment of India to Secretary of State, 2 Feb. 1905, P.P., 1906,
[Cd. 2746] vol. LXXX, p. 660.
 THE PARTITION OF BENGAL 37

and particularly Calcutta interests were severely affected by the

Partition- but it was for the Europeans, official and non-official,
that adjustments were made.
A reform in the structure of Government raised as many
difficulties as a change of area. The secretariat was always
ready with the objection that any contemplated reform had no
precedent. In 1867, when an Executive Council for the
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal was suggested, they replied that
Executive Councils were for Governors and Governors-General;
men with little knowledge of India and in need of advice.
Lieutenant-Goverr ors were Civilians and therefore well acquain¬
ted with the local scene. Their argument was accepted, but the
Council advocates attempted to overcome the difficulty by
giving Bengal a Governor. This proved to be equally objection¬
able. How, it was asked, could the existence in Calcutta of a
Governor and Council, be reconciled with that of the Governor-
General and Council? An Executive Council a thousand miles
distant was bad enough but to have one in Calcutta would
bring chaos. The only answer was to move the Government of
India elsewhere. This was as far as the argument got in 1868
for no one was willing to face the task of moving the Imperial
capital.26
Why, it may be asked? Because of the uproar which this
would have occasioned in Calcutta. Bombay and Madras, on
the other hand, were heartily in favour of the proposal, for they
believed the Government of India to be inordinately influenced
by Culcutta opinion. That they were right in their belief, there
is no doubt.27 Besides the secretariat wallahs, for whom
Calcutta was a stronghold in the nineteenth century, there was
the European business community. Through the Bengal
Chamber of Commerce and through private influence, it could
put strong pressure on Government, and if checked its displea¬
sure found expression in the columns of the Englishman,
Capital and Commerce. It had a powerful lobby both in White¬
hall and at Westminster, and its opinion was always sought on
matters of importance. It is significant that in the early discussions

26P.P., 1867-68 (256) vol. XLIX, pp. 161-311.

21See Government of India to Secretary of State, 25 Aug. 1911,
P.P., 1911 [Cd. 5979] vol. LV, pp. 583 & 588.
 38 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

■ on the establishment of legislative councils, one of the

arguments in their favour was that this group should have a say
in legislation. John Lawrence’s proposal to abolish the Bengal
Legislative Council was rejected on the same ground that it
would not be fair to the Calcutta Europeans.28 They continued
to enjoy considerable over-representation in the Imperial and
Bengal Legislative Councils well into this century,29 and the
latter was given an elected majority in 1909, more than a
decade ahead of the rest of India, because the same Europeans
could be relied upon to support the Government through thick
and thin. Lord Crewe aptly characterised them in 1912 as
‘‘spoilt children in many respects, full of their historical and
social importance, anti-India cm fond, and keen to scent out
“disloyalty” in any independent expression of opinion, hide¬
bound too in class prejudices”30
The influence of Calcutta was the lion in the path of a
solution to the Bengal problem. Any attempt to partition the
’province was seen as a threat to Calcutta as a metropolis; any sug¬
gestion to shift the Imperial Capital was seen as a threat to non¬
official European influence. Both the Government of India and
the Government of Bengal, it seems, were bound hand and foot
by Calcutta until they were freed by the growth of counter forces
in the late nineteenth century. One was an awakened interest

28Minutes by H.S. Maine, 27 Feb. 1868, P.P., 1867-68 (256) vol.

XLIX, pp. 250-254.
29Consider the following analysis of the elected membership of the
Bengal Legislative Council, 1893-1906:

Percentages— of community of elected membership

(Partitioned Bengal) Legislative Council

Professional middle class 1.6% 52.8%

Landlords (67% of community 13.2%
engaged in agriculture)
Muslims 18.0% 5.7 %
Indian commerce 0.8% 3.8%
Europear commerce [0.1%] 20.8%

(Government of India to Secretary of State, P.P., 1908, [Cd. 4426]

vol. LXXVI, pt. I, p. 23).
30Crewe to Lord Carmichael, 15 Jan. 1912, Lady Carmichael of
Skirling: Lord Carmichael of Skirling: a Memoir (London, 1929) p. 151.
THE PARTITION OF BENGAL 39

in Indian affairs in Britain, and anew determination to control

Indian policy from at Home. The other was the development
of educated Indian opinion, especially in Bengal, constituting a
challenge to old vested interests, although it too was centred on
Calcutta. These two forces came to maturity in the first decade
of the twentieth century,31 making possible bold measures,
despite continued I.C.S. hesitation and Calcutta hostility. The
British Liberal Party’s electoral victory of January, 1906, in
particular, heralded a new era of Home control of Indian affairs.
Significantly, the provision of an Executive Council for the
Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal in 1910 was the result of a
recommendation of the Royal Commission on Decentralisation
and the work of John Morley,32 both of whom were regarded
by many Civilians as intruders. Similarly the reunion of Bengal
under a Governor and the transfer of the Imperial capital follow¬
ed suggestions in the parliamentary debates on the 1909
Reforms; suggestions implemented by Lords Hardinge and
Crewe.33 They were aware of the furore this would create in
Calcutta, and hence the secrecy with which the operation was
planned. That the Viceroy and Secretary of State were willing
to invoke the wrath of European Calcutta, indicates how the
strength of the latter had declined. Thirty years earlier European
opinion had forced the Government of India into impotent and
shameful retreat over the Ilbert Bill; now its protests could be
ignor:d.34
This goes long way towards explaining why 1905-1912 were
the years of action: Calcutta had lost its power to obstruct
unwelcome innovation. Theie were two other factors of prime
importance. One was the legacy which Bengal had inherited
from seventy years of procrastination. Her administrative

31See Curzon to Sir A. Godley, 27 Jan. 1904, Ronaldshay, op. cit.,

pp. 326-327; and speech by Curzon “The Indian Civil Service” delivered
at the I.C.S. Club, London, 8 July 1910, Lord Curzon: Subjects of the
Day (London, 1915) p. 58.
32P.P., 1908 [Cd. 4360], vol. XLIV, pp. 157-60; ibid [Cd. 4426]
LXXVI, part I, p. 52.
33Lord Hardinge of Penshurst: My Indian Years, 1910-1916 (London,
1948) pp. 36-40.
34Many Indians realised that the Delhi pronouncements represented
a significant defeat of the old powers in India. E.g. see editorial [by
P.C. Ray] in Indian World, vol. XV, (Calcutta, Jan. 1912) pp. c7-99.
40 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

malaise was by them so acute that to have postponed a cure any

longer would have been fatal. The disclosures of the Indian
Police Commission in 1903 on the neglect of eastern Bengal
had left no doubt on this point.30 The other was the person¬
ality of the Viceroy. In Curzon. India had a reformer of extra¬
ordinary vigour and unswerving purpose, who would brook no
opposition when once convinced of the efficiency of a course of
action. He set his heart on solving the Bengal problem and
unfortunately chose partition as the way It was left for his
Liberal successors to repair the damage.
An answer can now be offered to the question: why 1905-12
and not 1895 or 1875? In the nineteenth century the antipathy
of the Civil Service to major change and to the delegation of
authority, and the strength of the Calcutta non-officials, were
barriers to any comprehensive reform in Bengal, but with each
year of delay the situation grew appreciably worse. At the same
time the development of educated Indian opinion and of
interest in India in the United Kingdom gradually freed the
Viceroy and his Councillors from the toils of Calcutta. Curzon,
determined to leave his mark upon India, saw his opportunity
in Bengal and carved the body politic into two neat administra¬
tive portions, but his handiwork was rapidly undone by Indian
opposition and British interference. The old province was
broken into three, and Calcutta was given a Governor-in-
Council to compensate for its lost Viceroy. By 1912 the problem
of the structure of Bengal's Administration was solved, and a
new chapter opened in Bengali history.

S6P.P., 1905 [Cd. 27 Wb] vol. LVU, pp. 657-977.

 3

A Plea for the Study of the

Indian Provincial Legislatures

The Bengali author, Nirad Chaudhuri, dedicates his first and

most famous book, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,
’“To the memory of the British Empire in India which conferred
subjecthood on us but withheld citizenship; to which yet every one
of us threw out the challenge: ‘Civis Britannicus Sum’ because
all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and
quickened by the same British rule”.1 This would serve equally
well as the dedication for a history of an Indian legislature.
Here is a monument, more or less enduring, to British rule.
Under that rule the legislatures could be nothing other than
subordinate, but their very existence encouraged the Indian to
claim the citizenship which was withheld, and trained him in the
political ways of his rulers. Whether this was, in itself, good is
a matter of opinion, but there can be no doubt that the political
awakening of twentieth-century India was a response to British
stimulus and that its tutelage was in British schools.
In view of the mass of writing on modern Indian history, it
may well be asked, why the need for further study in Indian
politics? The answer is that the Indian legislatures have been

1N.C. Chaudhuri: The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (London,

1951) p. v.
42 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

neglected, despite their importance, and that this neglect has

impoverished Indian historiography. Sir Lewis Namier, discuss¬
ing the contribution of his school to eighteenth-century studies,
once remarked that weather-maps are most regular and pleasing
to the eye when they are constructed from few observation-points.
Add detail by multiplying the points of view and the attractive
simplicity is lost. The gain in accuracy, however, is invaluable
and the pattern which finally emerges may be significantly new.
At present, the map of modern Indian constitutional and polit¬
ical history is being drawn in just such a regular and simple
pattern. The lines run deceptively straight and two of them are
ruled much more firmly than the others. One, political, leads
from the foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 to
its triumph in 1947; the other, constitutional, from the establish¬
ment of the Indian legislative councils in 1861 to the Independ¬
ence Act of 1947. Undoubtedly, these have been the main
lines of development but to limit study to them, as has been done
to a large degree, is to give a false perspective. The danger of
a whig interpretation of Indian history is very real. The remedy
lies in a change of view point and a closer study of reglected
detail.
That Indian historians should have devoted so much of their
attention to the rise of Congress is not surprising. This is a
success story and success stories make good reading. The con¬
stitutional theme can be regarded similarly by the British, but
here the historian, as a craftsman, is attracted equally by the
great milestones which stand along the way. From the assump¬
tion of direct parliamentary control of British India in 1858,
there is a series of historic documents inviting study: the Indian
Councils Act of 1861, which established provincial legislative
councils, and which introduced non-official members into both
the provincial and Imperial councils; the 1892 Act, which en¬
larged the provincial councils, extended their powers of discus¬
sion and introduced a form of indirect election; the Morley-
Minto reforms of 1909, which gave to the provincial legislatures
an unofficial majority and extended indirect election to the
Governor-General’s legislative council; Edwin Montagu’s
famous declaration of British policy in 1917 as the development
of self-governing institutions in India; the Montagu-Chelmsford
report of 1918 and the Government of India Act of the following
INDIAN PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURES 43

year, which implemented its proposals, increasing the

number of legislatures, enlarging their membership, widening
the franchise and introducing dyarchy to the provinces; the
report of the Simon Commission published in 1930; the papers
of the Round Table Conferences of 1930-32; the White Paper
and the proceedings of the parliamentary committee of 1933
which examined its proposals; the Government of India Act,
1935, under which India might have become a federation with a
large measure of provincial autonomy and dyarchy at the centre;
the reports of the Cripps’Mission in 1942 and of the Cabinet
Mission four years later; and finally, the Indian Independence
Act of 1947. Much excellent historical work has been done on
these documents, particularly by Reginald Coupland., Arthur
Berriedale Keith and A.C. Banerjee, but the detailed study of
Indian political history, which is needed to set them in perspec¬
tive, is lacking. The groundwork should include research on
the legislatures, particularly the provincial legislatures.
Emphasis needs to be placed on the provinces for a number
of reasons. In the first place because this is the most neglected
part of the field. In spite of the strength of Indian provincial
feeling, the interest of modern writers has been in the struggle
for independence at the national level. Yet it is in the provinces
that the birth and early growth of Indian nationalism can best
be traced. It is here, too, that the earliest constitutional conces¬
sions were won, and the principles of representation, election,
representative and responsible government first applied. It is
here that most of India’s statesmen and politicians gained their
early experience in the legislative, municipal and district coun¬
cils, and it was to elect these councils that the Indian people
were first enfranchised. Even the Congress party, the most
centralized of all Indian organizations, enjoyed twenty years of
provincial and municipal legislative and administrative experience
before it came to power in Delhi. Yet no significant work has
been done on this background.
The study of a province olfersthe student of Indian politics a
manageable area. Here he can sift some of the mass of untouched
detail; his boundaries are defined, his problems relatively local¬
ized. The politicians whom he must study lived within those
boundaries and most of the documents which illuminate their
activities are to be found there. By limiting himself to one
44 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

province he can become acquainted with its political history

over a considerable period, thus gaining continuity, without
losing a grasp of detail. The geography of India—its immense
distances and its climate—hamper the historian as they do the
invader, and the former like the latter must concentrate on one
area if he is not to dissipate his strength. The history of the
central legislature is yet to be written, but, in this field at least,
let the local work precede the national.
The question which must now be asked is, why a legislative
study? One may answer that this is the ground on which the
British have chosen that their rule of India in the twentieth
century should be judged. Indeed the judgement extends beyond
India. As J. W. Davidson has written: “The whcle justification of
the colonial system rests, in fact, upon the assumption that self-
government, though it is the ultimate objective, can be establish¬
ed beneficially only if there is careful preparation, and if the
time and the circumstances of its inauguration are carefully
calculated.”2 From the war of 1914-18, the declared British
policy in India was to train Indians for self-rule. The establish¬
ment of legislatures and the progressive widening of their powers
was the pivot of that policy. The end in view was not only self-
government but parliamentary self-government. The historian is
fully entitled, therefore, to enquire how well these institutions
fulfilled their educative role. Such an enquiry is the raison d’etre
of the series of studies on colonial legislatures edited by Margery
Perham,3 and alone it is sufficient to justify the exmination of
the Indian legislatures.
That is not to say that the historian may accept this as the
whole story. Obviously the legislative councils had functions
other than the training of Indian politicians. They existed pri¬
marily to legislate, and, until 1909 at least, their non-official
membership was valued chiefly as a source of local advice and
opinion; not as the germ of some future Parliament.4 Nor may

2J.W. Davidson: The Northern Rhodesian Legislative Council (Studies

in Colonial Legislatures, ed. Margery Perham, vol. Ill, London, 1948)
p. 131.
sMargery Perham ed.: Studies in Colonial Legislatures (5 vols.,
London, 1946-50).
4E.g. see Viscount Morley: Indian Speeches, 1907-1909 (London,
1909), pp. 91-2. This was, of course, general British colonial practice;
INDIAN PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURES 45

the declared British policy of full self-government for India,

apparently fulfilled in 1947, be accepted uncritically. K.M.
Panikkar, one of the most able of contemporary Indian
historians, can write:

The old ideal of imperial domination had disappeared with

the first war, and all the political manoeuvring of the period
between 1920-9 was in the nature of delaying rearguard
actions. The British authorities hoped to be able by their
superior political knowledge and experience to modify and
limit the independence which they knew India would ultimate¬
ly acquire; they tried to do this by creating classes and interests
which would support their position.5

Perhaps Gandhi was right in 1931 when he described the British

as having an unequalled faculty of self-delusion. “I know, if the
time comes to concede the equality I want for India”, he said,
“they will say that that is w'hat they have all along desired.”6
Even if it is shown (as the writer believes it can be) that the
end des:red by the British was fully responsible parliamentary
government for India, it is not necessary to accept this as a good
end. Is the British parliamentary system really suitable for
India? This is a question which the legislative historian must ask
and to which his work may suggest an answer. How strange did
the Indians find t sis exotic institution, and how well did they
master the subtleties of its working? Were the British right to
import a system which had proved suitable in its place of origin
and in the white colonies overseas, or should they have develop¬
ed something indigenous? In the opinion of John Stuart Mill,
writing in 1861, Britain could succeed in her task in India only

through far wider political conceptions then merely English

or European practice can supply, and through a much more

see editor’s introduction to Joan Wheare: The Nigerian Legislative

Council (Studies in Colonial Legislatures, ed. Margery Perham, vol. IV.
London, 1950), p. vii.
5K.M. Panikkar: Asia and Western Dominance (London, new edn.
1959), pp. 207-8.
6Quoted Michael Brecher: Nehru, A Political Biography (London,
1959), p. 174.
46 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

profound study of Indian experience, and of the conditions

of Indian government, than either English politicians, or those
who supply the English public with opinions, have hitherto
shown any willingness to undertake.7

Such warnings were heared frequently before 1914, but rarely

afterwards. It may be that there was no Indian alternative to a
parliamentary system, and, had the British offered one, paradox¬
ical as it may seem, none would have been harder to convince of
their good faith than the educated Indian.
Added point is given to this enquiry into the suitability of
the institution, by its retention after Independence in both India
and Pakistan, and by its subsequent abandonment in the latter.8
Is its early demise in the Muslim state an indication of its un¬
suitability, or, perhaps, of some failure in the training which
the British gave their wards? Here again there is a profitable line
of investigation: did the British pay enough attention to the
training of political leaders and the organization of parties on
which the system depends, or were they too concerned with
legislative forms? Research on the legislative councils will
reveal, perhaps, which political groups were favoured with
British support and which had their opposition. Where the
British put their weight may, however, have been immaterial.
Possibly the issue was settled once Congress had gained the
initiative and, indeed, the explanation of the survival of the
parliamentary system in post-Independence India may perhaps
be found in the unity gained by Congress in the fight against the
British, rather than in Indian legislative experience as such.
These are some of the questions with which the student of
the legislatures will grapple and, in themselves, they are a justi¬
fication for his study. All this, however, is reading history
backwards, and it must not be thought that the only reason for
the research is to find answers to current problems. That the
legislatures existed in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries
as an important part of India’s governmental structure, is surely
sufficient to warrant their examination. Here is a segment of

1Considerations on Representative Government (Oxford, edn. edited

by R.B. McCallum, 1946), p. 324.
This was written in 1960 when Pakistan was under martial law.
Parliamentary government was restored in 1973.
INDIAN PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURES 47

Indian history and a well documented one.

What are the elements of this study? First, and basic to the
whole, there must be an examination of the structure and com¬
position of the legislature at its various stages of development.
This will reveal, of course, the changing balance between official,
nominated unofficial and elected members in which constitu¬
tional progress lay. It will include an investigation of the forms
of proceeding and the conventions evolved to keep the legisla¬
tive machine in motion. In the period in which there were two
Chambers (from 1937 in most provinces) the relations, both
formal and informal, between them must also be observed. It
will require consideration of the changing electoral provisions—
the nature of the constituencies and the franchise—and of the
relations between the members and their electorates.
Secondly, there must be a detailed analysis of the member¬
ship of both Houses. Who were the men and women nominat¬
ed and elceted? What were their ages, occupations, classes and
castes? From what areas of the province or beyond did they
come, and what were their connections and their means? Were
they educated and did they have an experience of village or
municipal administration? Such questions may, and indeed
should, be multiplied tenfold. “‘Scratch a politician and you find
a landlord,” they say in Orissa.9 So far very few Indian politi¬
cians have been scratched ar.d it is high time they were.
On this foundation, the structure of parties and other political
groupings, both within the legislature and outside it, may be
examined. Flere again there is much work to be done. The main
organizations in Indian politics today—particularly the Con¬
gress Party, Socialists and the Communists—have been analysed,
but the parties which fell by the way have either been disregard¬
ed, or, what is perhaps worse, seen only as discredited rivals of
victorious Congress. These include the Liberals, the leaders of
Indian nationalism at the turn of the century, who were still
important for their moderating influence even in the 1930s;
the Zamindari and industrial groups, which were so powerful in
many of. the provinces in the 1920s and 1930s; and, indeed, the
Swarajists, the men within the National Congress who favoured

9F.G. Bailey: “Politics in Orissa”, Economic Weekly, vol. XI, no. 35,
August 1959, p. 1372.
48 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

participation in the legislatures and who split with their more

orthodox Gandhian colleagues in 1939 on the issue of Indian
support for the British war effort . Surprisingly enough, even the
Muslim League has received scant attention, despite its leading
role in the separation of Pakistan.
What were the links that bound the members of these parties
together, and the barriers which separated their groups?
The enquiry will involve careful attention to the issues debated
in the legislature and to the opinions expressed by members
inside and outside the council Chamber. It will involve an
analysis of the division lists and the examination of electoral
activities, particularly of alliances. At one level this investiga¬
tion of parties, as also the study of legislative membership,
will illuminate to some degree the relationship between the
provincial capital and the countryside; a relationship which is
full of interest in a land which is overwhelmingly agrarian but
which, apparently, was dominated politically by the cities. At
another level it will reveal the struggle for power and prestige
between the new group of westernized intellectuals, born of
British rule, and the old influential interests, whose authority
was based largely on landholdings. These phenomena are
linked, of course, and they have their parallels in other parts of
the British Empire, particularly Africa.
The discussion will also throw light on the European
commercial groups within the legislatures. From the first,
British interests were represented in the councils and in a few
of them had considerable power. In Bengal, for example, where
from 1937 their representatives numbered twenty five in a lower
House of 250, they held the balance of the shifting and uneasy
coalitions from which the provincial governments were drawn.
Equally interesting will be an enquiry into their attitude towards
constitutional advance. Was the British business community
as illiberal as common report has it, or was it, in fact, aware of
which horse had the running and fully determined not to back
a loser?
The study of parties must also open up the thorny question
of the rival religious communities. The friction between these
communities, particularly the Hindu-Muslim clash, was the
greatest problem faced by the British raj and the Indian nation¬
alists alike in the transfer of power. The gravity of the problem
INDIAN PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURES 49

is measured by its solution: the division of India. In colonial

territories the struggle for independence is always accompanied
by a contest between rival groups to succeed to the power which
is being relinquished by the imperial ruler. This contest was
unusually bitter in India because of the sharp religious divisions
in the community, and the consequent fear of the minority
groups that their corporate privileges, and even their existence,
were endangered by the British withdrawal. Naturally, pre-
Independence Indian politics were bedevilled with these religious
divisions and a consideration of the communal question must
be central to any Indian legislative history.
In 1909 communal representation was introduced to India
to give the minorities a voice in the legislatures. Two questions
must be asked—what was the motive which underlay this, and
what was its effect? Is it in communal representation, as Hindu
nationalists maintain, that the source of India’s tragic division
is to be sought? The findings of the Donoughmore Commis¬
sion of 1928 on Ceylon certainly lend colour to this assertion:

... we have come unhesitatingly to the conclusion,

that communal representation is, as it were, a canker on the
body politic, eating deeper and deeper into the vital energies
of the people, breeding self-interest, suspicion, and animosity,
poisoning the new growth of political consciou sness, and
effectively preventing the development of a national or
corporate spirit.10

This may have been true of Ceylon, but how true was it of
India where the communal problem was so much greater? If
the minorities were to retain their identity, was there any
alternative to communal representation?
In 1934 Lady Minto, in her India, Minto and Ad or ley,
quoted a letter of 1906 describing the Viceroy’s sympathetic
response to a Muslim deputation demanding communal repre¬
sentation as “A work of statesmanship that will affect India
and Indian history for many a long year. It is nothing less than
the pulling back of sixty-two millions of people from joining

10CeyoIn: Report of the Special Commission on the Constitution,

1928, P.P. 1928, Cmd. 3131, vol. VII, p. 39.
50 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

the ranks of seditious opposition 11 This revelation was hailed

by many Hindus as confirmation of their belief that the motive
underlying the introduction of separate electorates for the
minorities was divide and rule. How far this is true, the histo¬
rian of the Indian legislatures must enquire. Undoubtedly his
work will throw light upon the effects of communal representa¬
tion and possibly upon this more complex question of British
motive.
There are other lines which must be followed: for example,
the relations of the legislative council and its members with
subordinate bodies. The municipal councils and rural district
boards, in particular, are of importance, for these were (in
Lord Minto’s words) ‘ the intitial rungs in the ladder of self-
government”.12 The modern system of local government in
India was founded in the 1860s and 1870s, and extended by
Lord Ripon a decade later. From the first, some of the
members of these boards were directly elected, and it was on
them that a large number of Indian politicians gained their
first administrative experience. This was true even in the 1920s
and 1930s for Congressmen, who could not countenance parti¬
cipation in the legislative councils, entered municipal corpora¬
tions where, they considered., there w'as greater freedom of
action. Jawaharlal Nehru, Chairman of the Allahabad munici¬
pality, was just one among many. Consequently these local
organs had extraordinary importance in provincial politics.
Also to be considered are the relations between the provin¬
cial legislative council and superior bodies, particularly the
Indian central legislature and the British Parliament. These
defined the limits within which the provincial legislatures
could act. No less important is an examination of the contacts
with Government, both at Viceregal level, and, more immedi¬
ately, in the provinces. Here the development of the institu¬
tion will be traced from its birth as a small group of Govern¬
ment officials, presided over by the provincial Governor or
Lieutenant-Governor and assisted in the work of legislation
by a number of Governor’s nominees, to a two-Chamber

nMary, Countess o’ Minto: Iidia, Minto and Morley, 1905-1910

(London, 1935), pp. 47-8.
nIbid., p. 47.
INDIAN PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURES 51

legislature with a total membership, in the larger provinces, of

more than 300, from which the Governor’s ministers were drawn
and to which they were responsible. Between the two lay the
daring experiment of dyarchy, “the technical term for hand¬
ing over the steering-wheel and retaining control of the accele¬
rator, the grear-lever and the brake”, as Philip Mason has
described it.13 The effects of this division of authority, from
1921-37, between ministers responsible to the legislature and
those responsible to the Governor alone, will form a most
fascinating and important part of any Indian legislative study.
Again, secondary issues suggest themselves. On the one
hand there will be interest in observing the part played by the
legislature in social and economic reform, an important aspect
of all colonial development in this century and particularly
significant in India where the departments concerned with
social and economic welfare were among the first handed over
to Indians. On the other hand will be seen the difficulties of
nationalist politicians in office, trying to reconcile (with greater
or lesser success) the independence struggle with the day to¬
day burdens of administration; the old loyalties of the fight
with the growing, though reluctant, loyalties to a Government
which they now saw through new eyes. The dangers of their
position were grasped by Nehru in 1938 when he wrote: “They
are trying to adapt themselves far too much to the old order
and trying to justify it. . . . What is far worse is that we
are losing the high position that we have built up, with so
much labour, in the hearts of the people. We are sinking to
the level of ordinary politicians.”14
Another profitable line of enquiry will concern the attitude
of the council members to the civil service and their opinions
on the increase in its Indian membership. Did they, for
instance, concur with the Calcutta Statesman in regarding it
as “a file-flattened bureaucracy”?15
Lastly, attention must be given to the relations between the
legislature and the press. As early as the second quarter of

13Philip Woodruff (Mason’s pseudonym): The Men Who Ruled India

(London, 1954) vol. II, p. 211.
“Nehru to M.K. Gandhi, April 1938, J. Nehru: The Unity of India
(London, 3rd impression 1948), p. 106.
“Quoted Woodruff, vol. II, p. 335.
52 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

the nineteenth century the Indian press was flourishing. In

1830, for example, Bengal alone had no fewer than forty-nine
newspapers and periodicals.16 Although political journalism
was hindered by the restrictions imposed in the interests of
British rule, it proved of hardy growth and was of major im¬
portance at all stages of the independence movement. Every
leading party, and even many of the smaller provincial groups,
used the press to advantage. It provides the historian of
Indian politics with an invaluable source of evidence, as well
as formrng an important part of his research in its own right.
This is the structure of the study but, of course, structure
alone is insufficient. To determine the shape of the human ant¬
hill and to map the beaten tracks along which the ants scurry is
important, but the final purpose is to discover why they hurry
in these long lines and to what end they build. Motive must
be sought; the lasting issues which give meaning to the whole
must be distinguished. It is difficult as yet to say what those
issues will be, for the documents lie unexplored, their clues
hidden. At this stage can be seen only a few of the threads
which may be significant, and most of these have been
suggested already. Obviously the development of the consti¬
tution is one. What pressure did the legislative councillors
exert to win constitutional concessions? Which was the
more important at various stages in forcing advance, local
demand or the influence of the British House of Commons
and electorate? How did the councillors regard the changes
once gained? Did these alter the relations of the political
groups with their rival parties on one side, and the British on
the other? Another significant theme concerns the part played
by communal ties in Indian politics. There must be an estimate
of the importance of caste, class, occupation, locality and reli¬
gion in determining political behaviour. No less important is
an examination of the nature of political leadership. Who
were the outstanding figures? What were their techniques and
how able were they? Were they men of city or countryside?
Has there been in India (as Myron Weiner suggests) a slow but
certain shift in political power over the last fifty years from

16.4;rjarita Baras: The Indian Press (London, 1940) p. 189.

INDIAN PROVINCIAL LEGISLATURES 53

the former to the latter?17 The record of the Indian ministers

in office must be examined, their success or failure weighed
against the difficulties which they faced. Their part in social
and economic reform, and in handling the growing problems
of industrialization, must be measured. This is the reverse side
of the coin: how did the Indians use the power transferred by
the British? As yet we have only questions and no answers.
In conclusion, one note of caution should be sounded. The
historian must beware of the temptation to exaggerate Ihe
importance of the legislature. Working within its walls, sur¬
rounded by its voluminous records, and communing with its
members, dead and alive, he will find it all too easy to forget
the wider community of which it is but a small part. Through¬
out, he must attempt to evaluate its place in the community,
even if this finally involves the admission that the part played
by the institution was not as great as he first thought.

17Myron Weiner: “Changing Patterns of Political Leadership in

West Bengal”, Pacific Affairs, vol. XXXII, no. 3, September 1959,
pp. 277-83.
 4

The Vote and the Transfer of Power:

A Study of the Bengal General Election,
1912-1913

Representative Government was an institution dear to the hearts

of nineteenth-century Englishmen. It was their pride and, they
affirmed, the source of their national strength that they lived under
this form of constitution. They were eager that others, especially
their colonies, should enjoy its benefits. There were few obstacles
in the way of the establishment of representative institutions in
the white colonies: the land was different but the people were
the same. But in India neither the land nor the people resembled
those of England. Nonetheless, the British determined to train
an educated, Westernized elite which would make possible the
establishment of representative institutions there.
This is the classical British interpretation of the development
of representative government in India.1 I am not concerned here
with its validity but with its effects upon the historiography of the
Indian legislatures. Because of the acceptance of this inter¬
pretation, the legislatures have generally been discussed in terms
of those men who held as their political ideal the constitutional
advance of India to parliamentary self-government, and who

*E.g. see Reginald Coupland: Report on the Constitutional Problem

in India (London, 1942-3), pt. 1, chpt. 2.
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 55

are seen as proteges of the British. Furthermore, the model and

most of the evidence for these histories has been taken from the
reports upon the working of the Indian constitution which were
periodically submitted to the British Parliament. It is.my belief
that the result has been an overemphasis upon constitutional
history and a consequent misconstruction of the part played in
the legislatures by the advocates of constitutional advance. I am
also of the opinion that their social position has been misunder¬
stood. I argue my case in this paper from an analysis of the first
general election for the Legislative Council of reunited Bengal,
held in December 1912 and January 1913.

The Banerjea Group

The immediate background to this election was the Morley-

Minto reforms, which attempted to conciliate nationalist opinion
by associating Indians more closely with the government of their
country. Membership in the Governors’, Viceroy’s and Secretary
of State’s Councils was now granted to them; they were conced¬
ed the right to elect to the legislative councils; and non-officials
were placed in a majority in those of the provinces. We must
“do our best to make English rulers friends with Indian leaders,”
wrote the Secretary of State, John Morley, “and at the same
time ... to train them in habits of political responsibility.”2 In
Bengal the concessions were coldly received by the politicians.
Grateful we are, they replied, but your friends we cannot be
while the partition of Bengal remains. This was the province
which Lord Curzon had found in greatest need of administrative
reform, but it was also the province which he had antagonized
most. His efforts to i eorganize the Calcutta Corporation and
University, and to reduce the province to manageable size had
driven the Bengali leaders into unequivocal opposition. Co¬
operation with the Government was impossible, they declared,
while the partition remained. The unrest which attached to this
question was a continuing embarrassment to the British
Administration and at length it was decided that it must be
removed. In April 1912 Bengal was reunited. This was hailed

2Morley to Lord Minto, 2 April 1909, John Buchan: Lord Minto.

A Memoir (London, 1924), p. 289.
56 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

as a triumph by those who had led the opposition. Now, they

said, the way was clear for them to enter the legislative councils
and work the reforms in the spirit in which they were given.
They would contest the general election at the end of the year.
This political group can be readily identified (in terms of the
classical analysis) as that educated, Westernized elite on which
the legislatures were to depend. All the members were graduates
of Calcutta University and a number had received higher
education in Bengal.3 They were middle-class professional men
from various parts of the province, and, apart from two
Muslims, they were high-caste Hindus. They had the backing
of the most influential of the Indian-owned English or vernacular
Calcutta newspapers. Two of them had achieved the high
honor of the presidency of the Indian National Congress4 and
all had won reputations for their opposition to the partition
and their agitation for constitutional concessions. They were
liberal in the best British tradition. The political future which
they foresaw for India would be marked by steady constitu¬
tional advance to parliamentary self-government. Abdul Rasul,
Oxonian and Professor of International Law at Calcutta
University, in his election manifesto accepted the view that the
legislative councils were the proving ground for further
concessions and emphasized the importance which his group
attached to these bodies:

To the people of India has been granted the right of

increasing participation in the work of framing laws for
themselves, and to prove ourselves worthy of this right we
must return the best of our men. Laws that are passed in
the Legislative Councils affect the interests of all .... Great
responsibilities we have before us and if we do not exercise
our votes in favour of the best man. the ‘Hon’ble’ members

3The greater part of the analysis in this paper is based on biogra¬

phical information on the individual candidates, collected from variour
sources.
“This statement, in the original article, was inaccurate. Surendranath
Banerjea, of course, had twice presided at Congress sessions (1895 and
1902), and rtwo other members of the group, Bhupendranath Basu and
Ambika Charan Mazumdar were to be Congress Presidents, but not
until 1914 and 1916 respectively.
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 57

who may go to the Council will not be the sufferers, but we

alone shall be left to suffer. Our interests will remain uncared
for for three years to come.5

The principal political asset of this group was its leader,

Surendranath Banerjea. Sixty-four years old, with three decades
of political achievement behind him, he was the recognized
elder statesman of Indian nationalism. His was a commanding
figure, for he was a well-built man with strong features and a
striking white beard. With the emotional fire characteristic of
the Bengali, a command of English which few Englishmen
could surpass and an Augustan delivery, he could sway a
crowd of thousands with his oratory or win the astonished
admiration of the Oxford Union. His career epitomizes the
forces which shaped Indian nationalists of the nineteenth
century. Son of a Westernized doctor, born at mid-century
into Calcutta Brahmin society astir with the excitement of a
religious reformation and a revival of learning, he spent his
school days among the British boys at Doveton College. Having
taken a B.A. in English literature from Calcutta University, he
went to London and in 1869 passed the Indian Civil Service exa¬
mination, only one Indian having ever done so before. His elation
was short-lived for the India Office declared that he and another
successful Indian candidate had falsified their ages. Their names
were struck from the list. Banerjea challenged the decision in
Queen’s Bench, won his case and returned to Bengal, unwelcome
in a service which until then had been the exclusive preserve
of the British. Three years later he was dismissed for a minor
and (what was almost certainly) an accidental error in the
return of a law case. Banerjea the official was finished;
Surendra Babu the nationalist was born.
His heart was now set upon the po'itical regeneration of
India. With his material worries allayed by a chair of English
literature provided at a Calcutta college by an Indian benefactor,
he campaigned his cause through the columns of the Bengalee,
an English language newspaper for which he built an international

Government of Bengal. Appointment Department proceedings.

File 18L-3. B427-33. July 1914. (Subsequent references to proceedings
of this department give only the file number and date).
58 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

renown in the half-century of his editorship. He founded as his

political platform the Indian Association, a Hindu high-caste
middle-class organization, which had only one influential rival in
Bengal in the following forty years. At the end of the
seventies he toured northern India firing his audiences with his
gospel of nationalism; in the eighties he established himself as a
dominant personality in Congress; in the nineties he visited
England to seek support for Indian demands, and he took the
lead of the radical elements in the Calcutta Corporation and the
Bengal Legislative Council. Then came his clash with Curzon.
In 1899 the Viceroy reduced the number of elected members of
the Corporation and Banerjea led out 28 commissioners,
swearing not to return until unofficial control was restored. In
1905 he stigmatized Curzon’s decision to partition the province
as an attack on the growing political consciousness of the
Bengali. From platform and press he thundered his condem¬
nation and the extraordinarily vociferous response which it
evoked surprised him little less than it did the British. His
political star was at its zenith.
The popular enthusiasm waned with the years but Banerjea
and the Indian Association kept alive the partition agitation. In
1911 they sent Bhupendranath Basu to press their case in
England6 and their memorial to the Government of India on the
subject provided much of the wording, if not the idea, for Lord
Hardinge’s dispatch recommending the repartition.7 Banerjea
and his men were victorious; surely political Bengal lay at their
feet. “The future is ours,” sang the Bengalee. “The world-wide
forces of progress are with us and the sympathies of civilized
mankind will support us in our constitutional efforts for the
realization of our destinies which can only be accomplished by a
measure of self-government that will help forward the develop¬
ment of all that is best and noblest in us. Then will indeed
England have fulfilled her high mission in the East.”8
In fact, the immediate future was not theirs at all. The
electors to whom they came as conquering heroes treated them
shabbily. Banerjea personally had a resounding victory but, of

Tndian Association, Genera! Meeting proceedings, April 1911.

Ibid., Annual Report 1911, Appendix E, pp. 19-42; & P.P., 1911,
[Cd. 5979], vol. 55, pp. 582-98.
819 July 1912, p. 4.
 THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 59

the remaining twenty-seven elected seats, only three were won by

his followers. This caused widespread surprise and much heart¬
searching.9 Why did the group fail when it was (with good
reason) so confident of success, and when accepted theories of
nationalist politics would suggest that it should have succeeded?
A solution to this problem holds a number of important lessons
for an understanding of Indian politics of the period.
First, Banerjea’s group was not a party in any real sense.
There was agreement on political aims, certainly, but there was
no formal party structure nor discipline. The Indian Association,
to which all the members of the group belonged and which
might impress the superficial observer as a workable organiza¬
tion, was in reality a political club, well suited to preparing
memorials to Government and for organizing public meetings
of protest, but quite unfitted for the management of an election
campaign. Lesson number one: Indian politics of the second
decade of this century were not party politics. For Banerjea
and his men, this meant disorganization and confusion at the
polls. Personality and local influence (as we shall shortly see)
counted for considerably more than political allegiance, and it
must have been difficult for the group, as such, to make political
capital from its victories of the preceding five years. The lack
of discipline resulted, in one place, in three of the group contest¬
ing one double-member constituency, as it had resulted in
earlier years in the desertion of a number of Banerjea’s followers
of tie principle of non-participation in the legislative councils. A
more serious consequence was the electoral malpractices indulg¬
ed in by at least one of the group in a personal bid to gain a seat.
“The popular party has exhibited a weakness or want of organi¬
zation which is really lamentable,’’ wrote the Indian World. “It
lacks cohesion: it lacks discipline. Flalf a-dozen candidates
scrambled for a seat as starving beggars do after a piece of
bread. The party is a bundle of disjointed units which cannot
resist the slightest pressure from without.”10

9Englishman, 14 January 1913, p. 4; Capital, 16 January 1913, p.

154; Indian World, 15 January 1913, p. 2; Indian Empire, 14 January
1913; Native Papers 18 January 1913, vol. 2, p. 45.
1022 January 1913, p. 2. The Indian World was a Calcutta English
weekly edited by a prominent member of the Indian Association,.
Prithwis Chandra Ray.
60 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The second factor in their disfavor may have been the self-
denying ordinance of which they were so proud. Except for the
backsliders among them, they had been in the legislative council
wilderness for seven years. Their opportunity of dominating
the first elected councils in 1909 had been lost and when they
returned it was to find others firmly entrenched. Surely it is
significant that all but one of their number who were defeated,
suffered at the hands of sitting members. Here, I would suggest,
is a clue which should not be forgotten when the Swarajists
are observed, hastening back to the legislatures ten years later.
The third, and more fundamental, fact was that the partition
of Bengal disrupted provincial society. The outcry against the
partition, which certainly was loud and sustained, came in the
first place from the great Hindu metropolis of Calcutta, aghast
at the prospect of losing its economic domination of the rich
rice and jute lands of Eastern Bengal; it came secondly from the
Hindu entrepreneurs of the Eastern Bengal towns, now to be a
minority in India’s first Muslim province, who feared that their
links with Calcutta would be broken; it came from the Muslims
of Western Bengal, whose minority position would be even
more disadvantageous. The most serious division created was
between these three sections on the one hand and the Eastern
Bengal Muslims, who saw the partition as a heaven-sent oppor¬
tunity to prosper. It was also of advantage to the Biharis and
Uriyas, inhabitants of the West and South-West of the province,
who were elated to find themselves for the first time outnumber¬
ing the Bengalis, whose domination of the professional and
commercial life of their towns they resented as an alien intrusion.
Partition was currently believed to be the elixir and they were
soon demanding that it be applied to them.11
The surprisingly strong support which the anti-partition
campaign obtained from the Hindu middle-class (the bhadralok)
revealed a degree of discontent more intense than the British
had believed possible, and it is fairly certain that its basis was
economic. The partition coincided with a sharp rise in the
price of rice, Bengal’s staple, due mainly to the failure of the
crops in 1905. The harvests in the following three years were

nE.g. presidential address by a Bihari, Dweep Narain Sing, to the

Bengal Provincial Conference at Berhampore, 1907, Bande Maiaram, 2
April 1907, (H.P. Ghose collection, Calcutta).
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 61

all poorer than normal and by 1907 the cost of rice had risen
by 58 per cent. The agricultural classes benefited, if anything,
from this and urban laborers were compensated by increased
wages, but the bhadralok were severely hit. Most bhadralok
families (the family, not the individual, being the economic unit)
derived their incomes partly from land rents and partly from
professional salaries or fees. Neither of these sources was
sufficiently flexible to meet such an abnormally sharp rise in the
basic cost of living as occurred in 1905-6. Already the economic
pressure on the bhadralok was considerable, for members of the
three leading castes (the Brahmins, Baidyas and Kayasthas), of
which it was mainly composed, despised non-professional occu¬
pation and the professions in Bengal and elsewhere in India
could no longer accommodate all who thought themselves fit to be
accommodated. “ .. . the greater part of the economic difficulty
at present is. that many young men rate the value of Sehool or
College English education much higher than does the average
employer.’'12 Unemployment was one cause of discontent;
uneven distribution of wealth was another. While a minority
of the bhadralok enjoyed considerable riches, a large propor¬
tion lived in grinding poverty and many were hopelessly
indebted to money-lenders. In 1906 this source of supply ran
dry. At the time there was widespread belief in the “drain
theory” and very naturally the impoverished bhadralok blamed
their plight upon their British “exploiters”.
The result was an outburst of anti-Government violence.
Revolutionary samitis were formed from groups of young men—
mainly students—excited by the anti-partition speeches, incited
by extremist vernacular newspapers and organized by dedicated
leaders, who used the less pacific doctrines of Hinduism to
convince their impressionable followers of the divinity of their
cause. This was more than many of the anti-partitionists had
bargained for. The great landholders, in particular, were quick
to realize that they had far more to lose from a challenge to law
and order than from any readjustment of boundaries. As a
body they disassociated themselves from the agitation.13

12Bengal District Administration Committee, 1913-14, Report, p. 1?.

This report; the Census of India, 1911, vols. 1,5 & 6; and J C. Jack;
The Economic Life of a Bengal District (London, 1916), were the source
of this paragraph.
62 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Within the movement itself there were soon disputes over means,
and Banerjea and his followers found themselves losing the
initiative to radical elements. “Moderates are always at a
disadvantage,” commented Morley, as he watched the struggle
from the India Office. “The same forces that begin the move,
continue their propulsive power.”14 By early 1907 things were
so far out of hand that Banerjea joined with the zamindars and
the Muslims in a delegation to ask for the Viceroy’s interven¬
tion. “It was simply marvellous,” wrote Lord Minto, “with the
troubles and anxieties of a few months ago still fresh in one’s
memory, to see the ‘King of Bengal’ sitting on my sofa with
his Mahommedan opponents, asking for my assistance to
moderate the evil passions of the Bengali, and inveighing against
the extravagances of Bepin Chandra Pal.”15
Banerjea had caught a disease which has infected so many
nationalist politicians since his day; he had become a moderate
despite himself. When the Government struck at the revolu¬
tionary leaders in 1908, it was not Banerjea who suffered the
martyr’s exile in the Andamans—and young Bengal did not
forget.
After 1908 prices fell and with them the interest in politics.
Victory in the anti-partition struggle was another three years in
coming and by the time it did come there were vested interests
in Eastern Bengal which were grievously hurt. Dacca and
Chittagong (the capital and port respectively of the new province)
had enjoyed a mushroom growth.16 and now they were to face
once more the impossible competition of Calcutta. The Muslims
of the area were to lose their favored position. Even for Calcutta
the repartition had a sting in its tail: the capital of India was to
be shifted to Delhi. The departure of the Government of India
and its entourage gave much anxiety to the owners of city house

13Edinburgh Review, vol. 206, October 1907, pp. 290-1.

14Morley to Minto, 11 October 1906, John Viscount Morley: Recol¬
lections (collected works, London, 1921), vol. 2, 153.
15Minto to Morley, 19 March 1907, Lady Minto: India, Minto and
Morley, 1905-1910 (London, 1935), p. 109.
16E.g. in the decade 1901-11 the population of Dacca rose by 2i%
and that of Chittagong by 30%. The increase for Greater Calcuttta was
only 11.9% and for Bengal as a whole only 6%. (Census of India, 1911,
vols. 5 & 6).
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 63

property, many of whom were leading public figures.17 All in

all then, the Banerjea group’s victory was neither as illustrious
nor as universally welcome as they imagined or as at first sight
it appears. The electoral implications of this fact are easily
drawn. Lesson number three: there can be no great political
event in India (not even the departure of the British) which is
not attended by serious disadvantages for some sections of the
community.
The fourth factor in the group’s failure was the date. Politics
were out of season. Bengal was reunited, the harvest was excel¬
lent, prices were comparatively low, trade was booming18—what
was the sense in bothering with nationalist politics of the sort
that Banerjea and company harped upon? Better to look to
personal, communal or local interests. A C. Mazumdar, himself
a defeated Legislative Council candidate, lamented in May 1913:

It is useless and what is more perhaps positively harmful to dis¬

guise the fact that ever since the modification of the Partition
of Bengal public enthusiasmi n our own province has been on
the wane, and that the people of Bengal has been slowly and
silently relapsing into a state of political torpor. It is not my
intention to create an alarm, but I am afraid our public men
would be guilty of culpable neglect if they fail to take timely
notice of the actual situation in the country and in any way
contribute to their own deception as well as to the growing
demoralization of the public. Even the reformed councils will
be of no avail to us if there is not a volume of living, healthy
public opinion behind them actively working up to the end
which these councils are intended to achieve. Some practical
measures should therefore be taken with outloss of time to
revive the drooping spirit of the public, to infuse fresh
enthusiasm in the country and on every important question
to make the whole country vibrate with a common burning
impules as was happily the case during the anti-partition

17Lord Crewe to Lord Carmichael, 15 January 1912, Lady Mary

Carmichael of Skirling: Lord Carmichael of Skirling. A Memoir
(London, 1929), p. 151.
18Capital, 28 November 1912, p. 1255; Lord Hardinge of Penshurst.
My Indian Years, 1910-1916 (London, 1948), p. 67.
64 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

agitation in this province.19

Lesson number four: Indian nationalists were always in

danger of losing the attention of their following to the power¬
ful counter attractions of personal, local, and communal affairs.
At elections, in particular, there were always at stake many
issues to which nationalist aspirations were barely relevant
What follows will underscore this.

The Vote as a Source of Power

Before proceeding, a point of fundamental importance must

be made. The grant of the vote introduced a new form of
power to Indian society. From the British viewpoint this was
one stage (some thought an advanced stage) in the development
of representative institutions; from the Indian angle it was the
chance for a person, community, or political group to gain
power and increased status at the expense of other sections of
society. The Anglo-Indian Association, struggling for en¬
franchisement in 1908, grasped this point: “For any community
of British descent in India to be excluded from any scheme of
reform in which the franchise is conferred upon others, is not
merely to leave it alone in its depressed condition, but actually
to lower it further.”20 To be given the vote or to be denied it;
to be successful or unsuccessful at an election, were henceforth
important factors in the relations of Indian social groups. A
new power game was to be played. Those who played it well
were to inherit the future.
This can be illustrated by the scuffle which occurred in 1912
when it was proposed that the Indian commercial community
in Bengal might be enfranchised. In 1909 the Government had
rejected this suggestion on the ground that the trading classes
were “despised, weak or disorganised.”21 Instead it had nomi¬
nated the Secretary of the Bengal National Chamber of Com¬
merce, Maharaj-Kumar HrishikeshLaw, as their representative.

19Mazumdar to Prr.mathanath Banerjea, Hon. Assistant Secretary,

Indian Association, 13 May 1913, Indian Association MSS.
!0Anglo-Indian Association, Calcutta, Annual Report 1908, pp. 6-7.
£1File 18L-23. August 1913. This is also the source for the subse¬
quent two paragraphs.
THE VOl E AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 65

On February 23, 1912, the Chief Secretary to the

Government of Bengal wrote to the Bengal National Chamber
of Commerce and to the Marwari Association, the two leading
Indian commercial bodies in Calcutta, asking their opinion on
the composition of a commercial electorate. Both replied that
there should be two commercial representatives, but whereas
the Marwari Association suggested that one should be chosen
by each body, the Chamber of Commerce preferred that it alone
should have the right to elect. It emphasized that the question
was one of prestige. In framing the election rules, wrote Law,
“I hope you will be pleased not to put our Chamber in the same
category with the associations of shopkeepers, petty dealers and
other people whose ways are not our ways and whose ideas are
not our ideas, otherwise it will lower us in public estimation,
and the boon granted under such circumstances would not at
all be appreciated by us.”22
The news was abroad, however, that there was a seat on the
Legislative Council to be had for the asking, and the “people
whose ways are not our ways” hastened to assure the Govern¬
ment that their particular organization represented Indian
commerce more truly than any other. The prize for ingenuity
went to our old friends at the Indian Association. The fact
that few, if any, of them were businessmen, they regarded as a
minor consideration when a seat in the Legislative Council was
at stake; so they formed their own commercial body—the
Society of Merchants and Traders of Bengal—and offered it as
a suitable electorate. “As must be well known to Government
the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce is a one family
show,” they wrote, “and that family [the Laws] the most sincerely
hated in the country. For the Chamber to exercise the right
and privilege of franchise is to abuse it.” There were several
other bodies which should participate in any election, partic¬
ularly the new Society “which under the aegis of Babu Sl rendra
Nath is likely to be an important factor in the national life.”23
All this served to convince the Government that its earlier
analysis had been correct and that the franchise could not yet be
granted to Indian commerce.

22Law to W.R. Gourlay, Private Secretary to Governor, 26 May

1912, ibid.
88H. Dutt to same, 11 May 1912, ibid.
66 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

His Excellency [the Governor, Lord Carmichael] thinks

that it will probably be necessary to nominate this year again;
but he was much impressed by the view expressed by the
Maharaj-Kumar Hrishikesh Law that if the franchise were
given to the National Chamber of Commerce, it will increase
the reputation of that body to such an extent that all Indian
merchants would come within its influence and the National
Chamber of Commerce would then represent Indian commerce
in the same way as the Bengal Chamber of Commerce
represents European commerce.
His Excellency was also impressed by the Maharaj-Kumar’s
view that the National Chamber of Commerce would rather
not be asked to nominate along with the other Chambers,
because if the Government did not accept the National
Chamber’s nomination and did accept the nomination of
another body, the Chamber would be lowered in the eyes of
the Indian merchants, and much of its influence might be
lost. I understand that the Maharaj-Kumar would prefer
that Government should not call for nominations, but should
choose a man direct.24

This was done and Law was the representative chosen.

A number of points emerge. It is clear that a seat in the
Legislative Council and the right to elect or nominate to it was
highly valued by several persons and organizations. It is also
clear that there was sufficient prestige and, perhaps, practical
value attached to the grant of the franchise, to make the manner
of its disposal important. The vote was, as I have suggested, a
new means of raising one's relative standing in the community.
The part played by the Banerjea group in this episode throws
new light on their failure in the election. It demonstrates that
their’s was a sectional group competing with other sectional
groups, and this indicates the need for an analysis of its struc¬
ture. Instead of our accepting these men at face value as
representative politicians, we shall learn more by determining
the features which distinguished their’s from other groups.
Obviously, shared political ideals were one of their distinctive
features; but it is of equal importance to know that, apart from

24Minute by Gourlay, 18 July 1912, ibid.

THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 67

journalist Banerjea, they were all lawyers; that those few among
them who held land had only small holdings; that, apart from
the two Muslims, they were all Brahmins or Kayasthas; that
they were untitled with one exception; and that all had won
their professional and political reputations in Calcutta. Clearly,
there were large sections of the community (for example,
commerce, the large landholders, and the Muslims) with which
the Banerjea group had little contact and which it could not
hope to represent if those sections put forward representatives
of their own—as they did. Lesson number five: one must
beware of accepting Indian political groups as “universally
representative” on their own testimony alone. The structural
analysis of these groups (especially of the Congress) and of their
support may open new doors in Indian political history.
The Gilbertian manner in which the Indian Association
politicians attempted to gatecrash the trading community affair
draws attention to another important reason for their election
defeat. The basis of the distribution of seats was sectional and
certain of the electorates were mutually exclusive. This was
considered policy. The British believed that the Indian
community was divided into many compartments, separated
one from another by strong social bulkheads. For a legislative
council to be truly representative, they argued, it must be
composed of members drawn from as many as possible of the most
important of these segments. This, it must be admitted, was a
logical argument at the Morley-Minto stage, when the aim was
for the legislative councillors to represent to their British rulers
the various needs of India. The crucial issue, however, was the
definition of what were the “important” sections of the
community. On this question there could be no hope of a
consensus.
Judging by the number of seats allocated, the Government
of India considered the important sections of the community
in Bengal in 1912 to be the Civil Service (14 seats), mofussil
local bodies (11 ),25 European trade and commerce (7), the
Muslims (5), Landlords (-*), the Corporation of Calcutta (2),

25“Local body” was not a term used in India but, for convenience,
it is employed here to include municipalities and district and local
boards, the members of which were grouped to form electorates for the
Legislative Council.
68 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

and Calcutta University and Indian commerce (1 each).26 Of

these, the Indian Association lawyers could hope to gain only
the local body, the University and, at most, two of the Muslim
seats. From the remainder they were excluded. Their reaction
was natural. They declared that the dice were loaded against
them:

Whatever may be the other defects of the Council regula¬

tions, want of a sense of humour is certainly not one of them,
though one would not naturally look for humour at Simla
Government Secretariats. In every civilized country, the rule
seems to be to allow educated men to come to representative
institutions, but here out in India, though the expansion of
the Councils themselves has been due to the presistent
agitation of the educated community, it is they alone who
have been effectively kept out from any active participation
in the reformed Councils.2'

This was hyperbole but it was true that the Government had
purposely formed some electorates from which the educated
middle-class would be excluded. It recognized that the legisla¬
tive councils were modifying the structure of Indian society; it
feared that the small Westernized Hindu urban middle-class had
been given too much influence in the councils formed under the
1892 Act: and it was determined that other “important” sections
of the community should be better represented in future.28 In
particular, it wanted more landlord and Muslim representatives.
The Government of India regarded the large landholders
as the traditional leaders of Indian society and asthe group which
had suffered most from the composition of the old councils.
They were valued as a conservative body, a stable counter¬
weight to the emergent middle-class. It was considered essential
to provide separate electorates for them; so that their most
illustrious members could be persuaded to offer themselves as

29The Council comprised, in addition, the three members of the

Executive Council and three nominated Indian non-officials, and was
presided over by the Governor. (P.P., 1913 [Cd. 6714], Vol. 47, p. 199).
Discussion in this paper is confined to the non-official members.
2'Indian World, 15 January 1913, p. 2.
MP.P , 1907 [Cd. 3710], Vol. 58, p. 457.
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 69

candidates without compromising their prestige. As was

emphasized in a memorial to the Government of Bengal in 1909,
it was not for them to be begging their inferiors for the favor
of election:

These great zamindars actuated as they are by oriental

ideas of social dignity would consider themselves greatly
humiliated if they are forced to convass for votes among
their subordinate tenure-holders, tenants, retainers and
persons of inferior status. If by any chance they be obliged
to stoop to such infamous practices, their positions would be
lowered in the eyes of the people, their influence would be
greatly reduced and their sphere of usefulness become
extremely limited.29

In deference to this feeling the franchise for the four zamindari

seats was restricted to approximately 500 substantial land¬
holders.30 As a result, three at least of their four elected repre¬
sentatives in 1913 conformed very well to the pattern of pillars of
conservative society. They were titled; two were Brahmin, one
was Kshatriya, each came from the leading landed family of
his district; they were influential members of their local land¬
holder associations; and they could pride themselves that they
had been forced to engage in no professional or commercial
venture. The fourth member, Byomkesh Chakravarti, however,
was rather a black sheep. He was returned for the Presidency
division, an electorate dominated by Calcutta landlords, many
of whom had made their money in trade. Although a large
zamindar, he was also a London educated lawyer practicing in
the Calcutta High Court. He was Honorary Secretary to the
Bengal Landholders’ Association, a rival body to the aristocratic
British Indian Association to which the great hereditary land¬
holders belonged. He held radical political views and was
regarded as a rival to Banerjea as a leader of liberal opinion.31

29Prodyar Coomar Tagore to British Indian Association, Oudh, 18

January 1909, enclosure, British Indian Association records, Lucknow.
(I am indebted for this reference to P.D. Reeves, University of
Western Australia).
30Calcutta Gazette, Extraordinary, 23 November 1912.
slNayak, 14 January 1913; Native Papers, 18 January 1913, vol. 1,
70 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Four seats were specially provided for the zamindars but a

glance at the composition of the Bengal Legislature in 1913
reveals that no fewer than 17 of the 26 Indian non-official
members were landholders. Three of these were Government
nominees: Law, representing Indian Commerce; Dr. Nilratan
Sarkar, an eminent physician; and Sir Kwhaja Salimulla
Bahadur, Nawab of Dacca, “for no Legislative Council for
Bengal would be complete without the uncrowned king of the
Muhammadans of East Bengal.”32 This leaves ten zamindars.
Three, we find, were returned by Muslim electorates, one by
the Calcutta Corporation and six by mofussil local bodies. This
caused much perturbation at the Indian Association. The Indian
World complained: “The Government is full of paternal solici¬
tude on behalf of the Zamindars. But if one thing is more
clear than another it is this that the Zamindars do not stand
in need of any special protection. If protection is at all needed,
it not for them but against them.” It spoke of “their long
purse and still longer following” and continued: “The elections
in Bengal were fought more or less on personal issues. Votes
were given on personal considerations, rather than on considera¬
tions of public policy or principle. The position of a candidate,
not his capacity to work, or the quality of work he would turn
out, was looked into. Truly we are in the elementary stage of
public life. We blame the Government for the Regulations,
none-the-less should we blame ourselves.”33
This underlines what was said earlier about the issues at stake
in elections of the period. The length of a candidate's rent roll,
his local prestige, his religion, caste and family, his connections,
his wealth, his benefactions, were in most electorates of greater
importance than his education or political beliefs. The influence
of landholding, the traditional source of power in India, was
under siege from the rising urban middle-class; the battle may
already have been decided in the latter’s favor, but there were
still many weapons in the zamindari arsenal.
This can be demonstrated by examining the course of the
1912-13 election in one of the Bengal electorates. The Rajshahi

p. 60; Hindoo Patriot, 20 January 1913, ibid., 1 February 1913, vol. 2,

pp. 83-4.
32Hindoo Patriot, ibid., p. 83.
3322 January 1913, pp. 2-3.
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 71

Division District and Local Boards electorate may be taken as

an example. Rajshahi Division comprised the whole of
Northern Bengal and the majority of its population was
Muslim.34 The candidates came from four of the five southern
and most populous districts. They were Jogesh Chandra
Chaudhuri, M.A., member of the Pabna district bar and son-
in-law of Surendranath Banerjea; Maharaja Girija Nath Roy
Bahadur, a large landholder in both the Dinajpur and Rajshahi
districts, an influential member of the British Indian Association
and a member of the old Legislative Council of Eastern Bengal
and Assam; Raja Mohendra Ranjan Roy Chaudhury, also a
member of the Eastern Bengal and Assam Legislative Council
and of the Eastern Bengal Landholder’s Association, and a
titleholder in Rangpur district; and Maulvi Hafizar Rahman
Chaudhuri, a young man, the only Muslim candidate, who was
a small landed proprietor from Bogra.
Jogesh Chandra Chaudhuri, hoping to win the favors of the
Muslim voters, persuaded two Muslims to propose and second
his nomination but this did him no good. The Muslim commu¬
nity in this area had bitter memories of communal rioting during
the anti-partition boycott agitation six years before and for
this they blamed Chaudhuri’s father-in-law, Surendranath
Banerjea. Besides, Chaudhuri had chosen unwisely in selecting
his seconder. This man, Maulvi Emaduddin Ahmed, proved to
be the chief electoral agent of the Raja of Kakina, Mohendra
Ranjan Roy Chaudhuri, and he did his level best to wreck
Jogesh Chandra’s chances. To this end he used a standard ploy
of the period: he informed the voters that the Rajshahi District
Magistrate was opposed to Jogesh Chandra’s candidature and
that his wrath would be felt by any who voted for him. The
Raja was an invalid but his ‘following and his purse” were
indeed long. Reputedly he spent Rs. 2000 on “inducements” to
voters; he offered travelling expenses to many; and Emaduddin,
on his behalf, provided those who came to vote in Rajshahi
town with hospitality “much above his own and their ordinary
style of living”. It was the Raja, not Babu Jogesh Chandra, nor
even Maulvi Hafizar Rahman, who caught the ear of the
Muslims. He let it be known that he was willing to pay oft' the

ziCensus of India, 1911, vol. 5, p. 257.

72 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

local Muhammadan Association’s debt amounting to Rs. 1500

and, better still, he received public support from the Nawab of
Dacca. Where the Nawab went many Bengali Muslims were
accustomed to follow. The Raja was elected.35
The strongest impression left by this story is how little it
resembled a twentieth-century British election, with its emphasis
on politics and parties, and how much more it had in common
with, for example, eighteenth-century contests. It must by now
be clear why any attempt to explain the 1912-13 election solely
in terms of the Banerjea political group was bound to be unsatis¬
factory.

Communalism and Corruption

In this Rajshahi contest, communal questions were obviously

of major importance and this was true of most electorates. We
have already remarked the Government of India’s desire to
provide the Muslims with special representation. Considering
that they were in a small majority in Bengal, this must appear
rather strange. The explanation is that the Muslim community
here was economically and educationally inferior to the Hindus
who held most of the land and who dominated the professions
and commerce. The bulk of the Muslims were peasant culti¬
vators.36 The Islamic community throughout India had been
less ready than the Hindus to grasp the opportunities offered in
the nineteenth century by the provision of English education and
it had been outdistanced by its rivals. Early in the twentieth
century, however, there was a resurgence of Islam in India (as
in other areas of the Islamic world37) and the Muslims began to
demand, among other things, a larger share of Government
appointments and increased representation in the legislative
councils. This new spirit was encouraged by the British and

^Bengalee, 29 December 1912, p. 4; File 18L-4. B444-62. October

1913.
3GE.g. the Muslims formed 52% of the total population of Bengal
but only 30% of its urban population (Census of India, 1911, vol. 5);
only 10% of those qualified to vote as landholders were Muslims
(<Calcutta Gazette, Extraordinary, 23 November 1912).
37See Wilfred Cantwell Smith: Islam in Modern History (New York,
paperback edition 1959), pp. 58-9.
 THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 73

the community was promised separate electorates and the reser¬

vation of a proportion of administrative appointments. This
provoked Hindu hostility, already aroused by the formation of
a Musli n majority province in Eastern Bangal and Assam. The
Muslims of the area regarded the partition as a great boon.
The obvious discomfiture which it gave to the local Hindus,
and broad (though somewhat irresponsible) hints from members
of the I.C.S. that the opportunity would be used to advance
Muslim at the expense of Hindu interests,38 raised unreal hopes.
Dacca and Chittagong boomed; there were more “jobs for the
boys”; the Nawab of Dacca held regal sway over the new
capital. It was an Indian summer which came to a sudden and
frosty end with the annoucement of the repartition in December
1911. This cut the Muslims to the quick. The British, it
seemed, had performed a volte-face to pacify Hindu extremists.
Muslim resentment was tempered only by the determination to
gain as many concessions as possible as indemnity for British
treachery.39 The Hindus were equally determined to oppose
any suggestion of compensation,40 for they believed that the
British were systematically favoring the Muslims. When the
Legislative Council regulations were revised in 1912, for
example, the Hindus demanded that they too should enjoy the
right of direct election which had been granted to the Muslims
in 1909, and the Government’s reply—that they must be content
with what representation they could secure through the local
body constituencies—convinced them of its prejudice.41
The strained relations between the communities were natur¬
ally reflected in the 1912-13 elections. The Hindus did what
they could to dissuade Muslim candidates from contesting local
body seats. These, the Bengalee informed them, were meant for
the Hindu middle-class. The Muslims were provided with
special electorates and “They cannot in all fairness have both.”42

38E.g. see Sir Bampfylde Fuller: Some Personal Experiences (London,

1930), pp. 140-1.
39Crewe to Carmichael, 15 January 1912, op. cit., p. 152; Statesman,
2 January 1912, p. 7; ibid., 23 January 1912, p. 11.
40H.g. consider their reaction to the decision to establish a new
university at Dacca; Statesman, 4 February 1912, p. 10.
41F.g. see Statesman, 5 June 1912, p. 7; & Native Papers, 23 Novem¬
ber 1912, vol. I, pp. 1370-1.
42October 29, 1912, Native Papers, 2 November 1912, vol. 2, p. 679.
74 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Only five of the 41 candidates for the local body seats were
Muslims and only one managed to secure election. Even this
was resented by the Hindus. It was the result, they hinted, of
infamous collusion between the zamindars and the Muslims of
the area.43 The Hindus had little cause for complaint: in a
Legislative Council of 51 members, only eight were Muslims
and, of these, two were Government nominees.
The Muslims, for their part, were determined that only
staunch communalists should occupy their five reserved seats.
It was to Abdul Rasul’s extreme discredit, for example, that he
was a follower of Hindu Banerjea; and even though he devoted
the greater part of his election manifesto to his aspirations for
the Muslim community, he was discounted as “not being a
good Mussulman.”44
How much of this mutual rancor was due to the existence of
communal electorates? This is an extraordinarily difficult
question to answer, for there were so many contributory
factors. Certainly the Hindus were suspicious of British motives—
this looked to them very much like a policy of divide and
rule40—and any redistribution of jobs w'as bound to foment hard
feelings on both sides. On the other hand, it is equally certain
that had the Muslims not been provided with special seats they
would have gone virtually unrepresented in the Bengal Council
in 1913. It was unfortunate for the future of representative
institutions in Bengal that it was found necessary to build into
the initial constitution the communal divisions which were the
greatest bar to its satisfactory operation. With the transfer of
more power in the 1920s, these communal divisions were to
paralyse the working of the Legislature.
It must not be presumed from Rasul’s case, that the Muslim
contests were marked by general agreement among the faithful.
If anything, they were more keenly fought than those for the
mixed electorates, for the Muslim community in Bengal was rent

43Indian World, 22 January 1913, p. 2; Proceedings of the Bengal

Legislative Council, 2 April 1913, vol. 45, p. 536.
44Indian World, 15.January 1913, pp. 2-3.
’’“The British wished for and tried to create an Ulster among the
Mohammedans of India.” Lajpat Rai: Young India; An Interpretation and
a History of the Nationalist Movement from Within (London, L1917])
p. lxxv.
 THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 75

by factions, a factor which was to be of consequence in the

subsequent history of the province. The Dacca division seat
was filled simply by the nominee of the Nawab fa young man of
destiny, Maulvi Abul Kasem Fazlul Huq46) but there were seven¬
teen candidates to squabble over the other four Muslim seats—■
and squabble they did. “The tactics and methods which some
of the candidates for election to the various Legislative Councils
in the country had recourse to in order to secure votes is
painful,” lamented Rasul after his defeat, “and the manner in
which some of the voters conducted themselves in the matter
of exercising their franchise were, to use a mild expression,
simply abominable.”47
Rasul, in contesting the Presidency division seat, had become
involved in a vendetta of some years standing. It illustrates
the disunity of Bengal Muslim society. There were at first six
candidates for this seat, but one withdrew in favour of Golam
Hussain Cassim Ariff, and it was between Rasul and him that
the contest lay. The Presidency division comprised Calcutta
and the electorate was dominated by merchants. Ariff, a silk
manufacturer, was one of a rich group of Surati momins, who
vied for social and commercial preeminence with an equally
prosperous, though smaller, group of Delhiwallahs. The ven¬
detta had begun in 1909 at the first elections for the reformed
Bengal Council, when Ariff secured nomination as a delegate
to vote for the Muslim member of Council, on the understand¬
ing that he would support Maulvi Badruddin Haider, Khan
Bahadur, who was the nominee of the Delhiwallahs. Instead,
he arranged for himself to be surreptitiously nominated and used
his votes to secure his own election. The fury of the outwitted
was unbounded.48 1912 gave them an opportunity to avenge
the defeat and they chose Rasul as their candidate. Ariff
proved as wily as ever. As we have seen, he whispered in many
ears that Rasul was not a good Muslim. He also had a number

40“The Nawab was very good to me,” was Huq’s comment on his
political debut. (Interview with the author, 11 December 1960). He was
subsequently Chief Minister of both Bengal and East Pakistan.
47Mussulman. 17 January 1913, Native Papers, 25 January 1913, vol. 2,
pp. 63-4. The Mussuhnan was a Calcutta English weekly of which
Rasul was joint editor.
48File 18L-42. B1650-55. June 1910.
76 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

of Rasul’s graduate friends warned that the Government was

angered at the support Rasul was receiving and that there would
be no further hope of official employment for any who voted
for him. Ariff made a close study of the electoral register and
on election day fortuitously received the votes of men who, it
was afterwards revealed, had been as far afield as Colombo,
Mecca, and Paradise on that day. According to Rasul, he also
“had most costly and sumptuous dishes” ready in a room close
to the polling booth and it was suggested to voters on arrival,
that they might care to partake after “satisfactorily” fulfilling
their electoral functions.49 He distributed money to voters in
the name of travelling expenses and he promised large sums
for the construction and maintenance of Muslim institutions in
many parts of the division.50 All this undoubtedly helped, but
the determining factors were almost certainly his influence as
one of the Surati community and as the sitting Legislative
Council member for the electorate. His victory was clear cut.
He secured 367 votes to Rasul’s 159.51
Again we see how politics (to use that word in the modern
Western sense) were overshadowed by the more important
questions of personality, connection, and wealth. Corruption
also played its part and this was by no means an isolated
instance nor was it the worst. In the neighbouring division of
Burdwan, for example, a candidate used his position in the
local Muhammadan Association to retain the names of absent
and dead voters on the electoral roll and, by illegally obtaining
possession of a number of voting papers, arranged for votes to
be cast on his behalf in their names. Reporting this to the
Government, the District Officer remarked: “The whole record
makes melancholy reading for anyone who has at heart the
interests of local self-government or the Muhammadan

49FiIe 18L-3. B427-33. July 1914.

60Muhammadi, 10 January 1913, Native Papers, 18 January 1913,
vol. 1, pp. 53-4.
“The two groups fought another round in 1916 when Ariff and a
Delhiwallah, Abdur Rahim, contested the Presidency and Burdwan
divisions seat in the Imperial Legislative Council, but on that occasion
Ariff was defeated. The candidates indulged in such blatant corruption
that the Government of India was persuaded (at long last) of the need for
an improvement in the electoral regulations. (Calcutta Gazette, 9 May
1917, part 1A, pp. 363-80.)
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 77

community in Burdwan.”52 It is important to realize why there

was such corruption. The superficial answer is that the elec¬
toral registers were inaccurate and this is always likely to
encourage malpractice.54 There were more fundamental
reasons The franchise was novel and exotic. It was introduced
to an illiterate and poverty-stricken society, which was polit¬
ically inexperienced and for which representative institutions
certainly had no intrinsic value. These disadvantages were
tempered, to a degree, by the restriction of the vote to a minute
fraction of the population (1 in 46505°) but the result was small
electorates in which a handful of votes could determine con¬
tests—and a handful of votes can often be bought. Corrupt
practices were restrained by neither party nor strong political
principle, and the community was unlikely to look askance at
the adaptation, to this new struggle for prestige and power, of
the accustomed methods of that time-honored Bengali insti¬
tution, doladoli—intrigue and conflict among factions. In this
there were ominous portents for the future. As more power
devolved upon the Legislature, the stakes of the game became
correspondingly bigger. Unless the game itself came to be valued
more highly than the stakes, there was the ever-growing danger
that it would cease to be played.
Another reason for tne failure of Banerjea men has been
revealed. Their political ideal—the desire that the Indian
electors and legislators should worthily exercise the franchise—
was a positive handicap when corruption was sanctioned by
public opinion and unpunished by law.
Earlier we observed that this group could contest only the
local body, University and two of the Muslim electorates. We
have seen that they were excluded from the commercial, the
zamindari and the remainder of the Muslim seats, but this still
leaves those of the Calcutta Corporation and the European
non-officials. The commissioners of the Corporation were
mostly businessmen and city landlords. Their two representa¬
tives in 1913 were John Apcar, a lawyer member of the rich

62Fi!e 18L-10-1-29. A105-33. September 1913.

63File 18L-61. A33-8. December 1913.
54See Thomas Edward Smith: Elections in Developing Countries-
(London, 1960), p. xi.
65Report of the Franchise Committee etc. (Calcutta, 1919), p. 48.
 78 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Armenian community which owned much Calcutta house pro¬

perty, and Rai Radha Charan Pal Bahadur, whose interests
were also in Calcutta landholding.
The European non-officials were provided with seven seats
in the Legislature, live by election and two by nomination.
For a community of 25,000 persons in a total population of
46,500,000 they were palpably over-represented but this had not
prevented their attempting to gain another five seats on the
grounds of social and commercial pre-eminence.56 As a Bengali
newspaper remarked, they were in danger of forgetting that
India was inhabited by Indians.57 In 1912 they were smarting
from the blow to their influence and pride which had been
dealt by the transfer of the capital to Delhi. It confirmed them
in the belief, born of the admission of Indians in greater
numbers to the councils, that the Government was giving way
“before the attacks of a democracy of literati, who have a
sense of nothing beyond their own importance.”58 The Govern¬
ment of India, they feared, had put its foot on a slippery decline
which might slide British rule, and with it British commerce,
into the sea. Hold was their watchword Their representatives
went to the legislatures determined to see that no further con¬
cessions were granted. They were drawn from various sections
of the European community—Calcutta trade, the mofussil tea
and jute industries, the ports of Calcutta and Chittagong—but
all fought under the banner of the Bengal Chamber of
Commerce, the best organized, most influential and one of the
most rigid communal associations in India. To the Chamber of
Commerce, the failure of the Indian Association group in the
1912-13 elections came as a welcome surprise. It proved, they
said, that most Indians were as tired as they were of all this
nonsense about nationalism and reforms.59 Not only did the
Europeans add one more to those communal blocs which were
to hamper the smooth working of the Legislature, but they were

66Statesman, 3 February 1912, pp. 6-7; Capital, 7 November 1912,

pp. 1067-8.
&7Ananda Bazar Patrika, 7 November 1912, Native Newspapers, 16
November 1912, vol. 1, p. 1345.
68Englishman, 25 December 1913, p. 4; see also ibid., 6 March 1913,
p. 4.
59Englishman, 14 January 1913, p. 4.
I HE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 79

also actively hostile to the ideal of progressive constitutional

advance for India.
The groupings in the Legislative Council which resulted
from the 1912-13 elections were revealed when the non-official
members proceeded in February 1913 to select their two
representatives on the Imperial Legislative Council, and the
result, incidentally, provides a final demonstration of the
basic problem which confronted the Banerjea group. Its two
nominees were Bhupendranath Basu. a sitting member of the
Imperial Legislative Council, and Banerjea himself. The great
zamindars and the Europeans jointly sponsored the Maharaja
of Nashipur, Ranajit Sinha; while the Muslims, revealing their
disunity, put forward three candidates: Dr. A. Al-Mamun
Suhrawardy (the man who had clandestinely nominated Ariff
for the Bengal Council in 1909), Z.R. Zahid Suhrawardy (who
also had Ariff’s support) and Nawab Badruddin Haider, Khan
Bahadur, (Ariff’s opponent in that affair). A compromise must
have been reached for the two Suhrawardys withdrew to give
the Muslims the appearance of a united front.60
In the lobbying which preceded the election, Banerjea and
Basu between them received the promise of 39 of the 68 total
votes and these they arranged to divide evenly so that both
might be returned. The plan misfired for Banerjea received 22
of the votes and Basu was left with only 17, thereby allowing the
Maharaja of Nashipur to squeeze between them with 18. There
were a number of reasons for this misadventure but the most
important, it seems, was the reluctance of some Brahmin
members to support Kayastha Basu when there was a Brahmin
candidate available in Banerjea.61 Here is an example of
sectionalism conflicting with nationalism. Banerjea and Basu,
as distinguished nationalists, could command the support of the
majority of the Legislative Council members including even
some Muslims and many of the landholders, but they could not
escape the effects of sectional interests. Indian nationalists
were always in danger of having their plans frustrated by these
forces.

60File 18L-56. B1891-1906. December 1913.

61Englishman, 28 February 1913, p. 7; & 5 March 1913. p. 5.
 80 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The British Withdrawal and Indian Society

So far I have emphasized the divisions among the Legislative

Council members. It must be realized, however, that as a body
they had much in common and much that distinguished them
from the bulk of the community. For one thing, they were
English speakers and, for another, they were educated, many
having attended universities in Bengal and Britain.62 The Hindus-
were all Brahmins or Kayasthas, with the exceptions of Sarkar,
who was a Brahmo, Law and Pal, who were from trading
castes, and the Maharajadhiraja of Burdwan, who was a Punjabi
Khatri. Only four among the Indians were not either land¬
holders or lawyers and, of the non-officials as a whole, only
four were not city or town-dwellers.63 Compare these figures
with those for the province in general and it is immediately
obvious how select was the senate. Only two per cent of Bengali
men spoke English and fourteen per cent were literate. Seventy
percent were peasants and only six per cent were town-dwellers.
Of the twenty-one million Hindus, less than two and a half
millions were Brahmins or Kayasthas.64
Clearly there were large sections of society which were not
directly represented, among them the lower castes and the
untouchables; the agricultural tenantry and peasantry; orthodox
Hinduism and Islam, to which Western learning and Western
ways were anathema; and the Anglo-Indians and Indian
Christians, who formed a small but not inconsequential
minority.60 These and others were excluded from the Legislative
Council. Some had no desire to be represented, but most
realized, however vaguely, that a new source of power had been
gained by others and they were apprehensive of its being used
to their disadvantage. Wrote the Nayak, a Calcutta Bengali
daily that advocated a Hindu revival:
b2Of the 26 Indian non-officials, 16 were university men of whom 5
had been educated in the United Kingdom. None of the European non¬
officials had attended university.
6‘Of the 34 non-officials, 16 resided in Calcutta and another 3 had
town-houses there. Dacca/Naryangung and Chittagong each supplied
three members.
64Census of India, 1911, vol. 5.
““There were 20,000 Anglo-Indians and 100,000 Indian Christians in
Bengal. (Ibid).
THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 81

The right of voting is one of the serious evils which, in

the guise of boons, English rule has introduced into this
country. The Municipalities and District Boards and similar
institutions have really nothing to do with the country and
with society, either Hindu or Moslem. . . . Only men who
have money and possess influence and can manipulate the
voters get into these bodies, which again return members to
the Legislative Council. . . . These Babus who are briskly
canvassing for votes, whom do they represent? There is no
telling what would have been the outcome of Mr. Basu’s
Marriage Bill, but for the presence of the Maharaja of
Burdwan on the Council.66 Why should such iconoclast
Babus be permitted to pass as representatives of the Hindus?
These Babus, who are utterly without religion, may be
likened to poison thrown out by the churning of Hindu
society by the English, and it is for the English like another
Nilkantha67 must grapple with them. Why, instead of doing
that, do Englishmen allow'this poison to scatter itself over
the whole framework of Hindu society?68

We have reached the antipode of our starting point. Those

men who were then to be the leaven of society have become its
poison. This brings us up short against the realization that the
training of a Westernized elite could look very different through
Indian eyes. At the basis of this criticism there lies an obvious
conflict of ideals. The Nayak did not want babus, it wanted
pandits. The British aim, it said in a later editorial, was to
Anglicize India. “If India is to get Home rule, her people must
lose their present national individuality, and approximate to the

66Special Marriage Amendment Bill introduced to the Imperial

Legislative Council in 1911 by Bhupendranath Basu. It was opposed by
orthodox Hindus and Muslims as it would have made possible inter¬
creed and inter-caste marriages, by providing for civil weddings.
(Proceedings of the Legislative Council of the Governor-General of India,
vols. 49 & 50.)
67The allusion is to the God Siva, who drank the poison raised by
the churning of the ocean by gods and demons and thus saved the
universe from its effects. The poison stuck in his throat, which became
blue and he himself to be known as Nilkantha-the god with the blue
throat.
683 December 1912, Native Papers, 7 December 1912, vol. 1, p. 1419.
82 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

ruling race before self-government can be granted her.”69 It is

true that there was an assumption of this sort underlying
British policy tawards the Indian legislatures and it is essential
that this assumption be made explicit when their history is
written. If it is not, it may disguise the fact that there could be,
and was, legitimate disagreement at this basic level.
The Nayak criticism also reflects a conflict of interest. Even at
this elementary stage, with the grant of the vote, power was being
transferred by the Imperial rulers. Certain persons and certain
sections of the community were gaining and certain were losing
relatively. There was a contest for this power and inevitable
dissension as to how it should be distributed and, even, whether
it should be distributed. This struggle was particularly severe
because of the segmented nature of Indian society. To reduce
conflict to a minimum, the British had to attempt to distribute as
fairly as possible the power which they were relinquishing.
They endeavored to control the pace of devolution and to
maintain their own position by balancing interests. This could
retard but could not prevent a revolution in Indian society. It
is in this context that communal strife in twentieth-century
India is to be understood. The clash of Hindu and Muslim was
the most fierce for these two communities were more sharply
divided than any others; but this must be regarded as a part of the
readjustment which took place at every level of Indian society as
the British withdrew—between caste and caste; between great
landlord and small; between zamindar and raiyat; between
capital and labour; between province and province. The reaction
of British commerce is also explicable in these terms. Their’s
was one of the communities which stood to lose from the devo¬
lution of power: they were haves who might become have-nots.
Admittedly they were most closely involved with imperium but
they were as much a part of, for example, the Bengal complex
as were the Marwaris or the Armenians with whom they vied
for the riches of the province—and only slightly more alien.
There were struggles within groups for leadership and, as
power settled more securely in one or two locales, there were
alliances (not all holy) between the successful and the far¬
sighted. Does this not explain the presence of the industrialist

6914 June 1913, ibid., 21 June 1913, vol. 1, p. 570.

THE VOTE AND THE TRANSFER OF POWER 83

Birlas in Gandhi’s camp—despite khadil

This was the political situation in which the advocates of
constitutional advance were involved. Their ideals and whatever
aspirations the British had for their training are of great import¬
ance but they are not the whole story nor can the history of the
legislatures be written in those terms. The constitutionalists
must be understood as a group among groups, possibly standing
in a peculiar relationship to the imperial rulers because of some
ideals held in common, but sharing the general concern about
the devolution of power. It is no disparagement of their idealism
to recognize that they saw themselves as successors to the
British in the seats of authority. Had they not done so, they
would not be ruling now.
 5

- The Forgotten Majority:

The Bengal Muslims and September 1918

Soon after daybreak on 9 September 1918 Muslims were

gathering in the narrow lanes between the stalls and godowns
of Burra Bazar in Central Calcutta. As the crowds grew
through that hot, sticky morning there was angry talk about the
Government’s prohibition of a rally on the Maidan the pre¬
vious day. and when a call came from the Nakhoda Mosque
for a pretest march on Government House there was a ready
response. Before midday the men started moving out on to the
main roads leading south, but they had not gone far when they
were stopped by armed constables who forced them back into
the side lanes. The mob milling angrily around the mosque
was now swollen to nearly 2,000, and, fearing damage to their
property, some of the local Marwari residents ordered their
darwahs to clear the footpaths in front of their gateways. Blows
were exchanged and when a shot was fired from one of the
Marwari houses rioting broke out. The police charged with
lathis but were forced back under a hail of bricks. They
opened fire, killing and wounding a number in the crowd.
Already looting and arson had begun in the immediate vicinity,
and this spread rapidly to other areas of the city, with the
Marwaris everywhere the chief victims. It took three days and
the bayonets of a .egiment of British troops to restore order.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 85

Looking back over a half century disfigured with the scars

of communal rioting in Calcutta, the pattern of these events
seems too familiar to excite comment, but there were features
of this riot which gave it unusual historical importance. It
was the first time since the unsettled days of the partition of
the province more than a decade before that mob violence
was used in Bengal as a political weapon, and this riot provided
a model for many of the vicious techniques which were later
brought to perfection by Calcutta mobsters. Equally as
important as the techniques of violent agitation were the dis¬
contents which gave the agitators their chance. The riot of
September 1918 was the most extreme expression of a general
disquiet in the Bengal Muslim community over the impending
reconstruction of the political system of British India, a
reconstruction in which it was felt the Muslim leaders would
have no effective voice. The outburst signalled a critical loss
of confidence in the community’s leadership and it can be seen
in retrospect to have marked the failure of the two strategies
upon which Bengal Muslim politicians had relied since the
turn of the century. At the same time it pointed the way to a
new course of action which might replace them. The design of
Bengal Muslim politics through the twenties was first sketched
in these violent days of September 1918.

To understand the crisis of that month we must review the

Muslims’ position in the political system of Bengal in the
preceding two decades. Under the Indian Councils Act of
1892 the British had maintained in Bengal a bureaucracy
composed entirely of career civil servants responsible through
its head, the Lieutenant-Governor, to the Government of India,
and assisted in legislation by a consultative council. The
majority of the members of this Legislative Council were
Government officials, and its powers of discussion and voting
were strictly limited to prevent its attempting to control the
actions of the executive. Its non-official members were to
function as consultants to the Government on legislation and
administrative matters, in return for which service they were
accorded privileged access to the senior officials and certain
 86 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

incidental patronage. In choosing these non-official councillors

the Government had two objectives: first, to secure influential
representatives of important interests in the province, and,
secondly, to include some members of the local bodies, which
were the infrastructure of Bengal’s political system and which
might in this way be linked to the superior administrative
institutions.
The Muslim community was singled out as one of the
important interests that should have representation, and to
each of the Councils formed under the 1892 Act leading
Muslims were invited. Some were eminent jurists and educators,
the remainder large zamindars, and in all cases their established
influence with their co-religionists was enhanced by their new
association with the Government. In a community which was
politically inexperienced and still subject to traditional controls,
their authority was assured, but they had no such assured
position in the political system as a whole. Without formal
institutional backing among the Muslims they represented and
with little influence in the local bodies, which were dominated
by Hindu bhadralok, they were dependent upon British
nomination, and by the turn of the century this system was
under strong attack from the bhadralok nationalists. They
demanded that the consultative council be replaced by a quasi¬
parliament, with an elected membership drawn from the Western-
educated and propertied classes, and representing territorial
electorates instead of interest groups or communities. The
reconstituted council should have some control over the
executive.
Whether or not these demands could be realised, the Muslim
leaders were ill-inclined to disregard this threat from the Hindu
bhadralok, for the political strength of the two communities
seemed so unequal: The Muslims in Bengal were superior in
number to the Hindus1 but numbers counted for little in
consultative politics, and the Hindu bhadralok commanded

lrThe total population of Bengal proper in 1901 was approximately

42,000,000, of whom 22,000,000 were Muslims and 19,250,000 Hindus.
By 1921 the total population had risen to 46,700,000, with 25,210,000
Muslims and 20,210,000 Hindus. (Census of India, 1911, Vol. V, Pt i, p.
199; and 1921, Vol. I, Pt ii, pp. 3, 6 & 40-3).
fHE FORGOT1EN MAJORITY 87

the critical resources of wealth and education.2 Their entren¬

ched position in the system of local self-government and the
educational boards, combined with their nationalist organisa¬
tion, gave them an institutional strength which not even the
British could afford to disregard. With growing militancy they
asserted the exclusive right of the National Congress to speak
for the ‘Indian Nation’ and increasingly they used Hindu
symbols to identify their nationalism. It was a reminder to the
Bengal Muslims that, despite their provincial majority, they
were part of a subcontinental minority, and a religiously alien
minority at that.

II

It was in this situation that the first strategy of Bengal

Muslim politics was mapped out. Its architect was Khwaja
Salimulla, Nawab Bahadur of Dacca, the most eminent of
the Government’s Muslim consultants, and the head
of Eastern Bengal’s largest Muslim zamindar family.3 His
policy assumed that the Muslims, as an educationally and
economically depressed community, could not hold their
own with the Hindu bhadralok in the rough and tumble of
electoral or agitational politics. It also assumed that the
British were worried by the growing strength and increasingly
aggressive tone of Hindu nationalism, and would welcome the
clientage of the Muslim community, whose leaders might
serve as a counterpoise to the Congress politicians and whose
peasant mass might be kept immune from disturbing nationalist
propaganda. The strategy was for the Muslim leaders to
proclaim the loyalty of their community to the British raj and
offer it in liege to the Imperial Government. In return they
would expect to be welcomed as courtiers at Government
House—able to advise and receive advice from the Lieutenant-
Governor and his officials—and in any constitutional or political

2Ibid., Vol. V, Pt i, pp. 357-8, 450, 55J & 553; and 1921, Vol. V,
Pt i, p. 302.
3For bibliographical details see C.E. Ruckland, Dictionary of Indian
Biography, (London 1906); and Proceedings of the Bengal Legislative
Council, 19 January 1915, Vol. XLVII, pp. 5-6.
88 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

resettlement they would expect their community to be given

favored treatment.
The Nawab publicly expounded his policy in 1906 when
Congress agitation for constitutional reforms and Hindu
bhadralok violence against the partition of Bengal had removed
any need for reticence. In a circular letter he proposed the
formation of a ‘Moslem All-India Confederacy’:

... to support, whenever possible, all measures emanating

from the Government and to protect the cause and advance
the interest of our co-religionists throughout the country,
to controvert the growing influence of the so-called Indian
National Congress, which has a tendency to misinterpret
and subvert British rule in India, or which might lead to
that deplorable situation, and to enable our young men of
education, who for want of such an association have joined
the Congress camp, to find scope, according to their fitness
and ability, for public life.4

Addressing the conference in Dacca at which the political

organisation was formed he said:

The resolution which I have the honour of moving today

has been so framed that the object of our League is frankly
the protection and advancement of our political rights and
interests but without prejudice to the traditional loyalty of
the Mussulmans to the Government and goodwill to our
Hindu neighbours. Whenever it is necessary to do so, we
shall represent our views to the Government and respect¬
fully submit our claims for due consideration. But whenever
the intention of any Government is misunderstood by our
people, it shall be equally our duty to remove that misconcep¬
tion . .. only after a League like the one we propose today
comes into existence can the Government find a representa¬
tive body to which to turn for ascertaining the views of the
Mussulmans ol India, and to which the Mussulmans them¬
selves can turn for consistent and firm support, sensible

4Edward E. Lang, ‘The All-India Moslem League’, Contemporary

Review, Vol. XCII, July-December 1907, p. 345.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 89

and sincere advice, and a true interpretation of the wishes

of the Government.5

The British were in need of support, especially in Bengal,

and they willingly accepted the arrangement on theNawab’s
terms. As a result the Bengal Muslims gained many concessions
in the decade up to 1911. In their discussion of the proposals
for a partition of Bengal, for example, the members of the
Government of India recognized the Dacca Nawab’s service in
countering nationalist influence in his community, and it was
one of their arguments in favour of the final partition scheme
that it gave the Muslims a majority in the new province of
Eastern Bengal & Assam and made Dacca its capital.6
Certainly the partition proved an advantage to the Eastern
Bengal Muslims. The new provincial Government openly
favoured the community, preferring Muslims for appointment
to the large number of new posts in the Provincial and
Subordinate services which were sanctioned in July 1906,7
allotting special funds and personnel for Muslim education,8
preparing plans for a new University and High Court for
Dacca, and installing the Nawab as their chief non-official
adviser and their main agent for the distribution of patronage.9
At the Imperial level the British yielded to nationalist
pressure for constitutional reforms, but the Muslims were
given the preferential treatment which they had requested.

5Ibid., p. 351.
6H.H. Risley, minutes 1 September and 6 December 1904, Govern¬
ment of India, Home Department Public Branch Proceedings, A155-67,
February 1905.
’Government of India, ibid., A29-31, July 1906.
sLord Carmichael to Lord Crewe, 21 August 1912, Lady Mary
Carmichael, Lord Carmichael of Skirling. A Memoir, (London, 1929),
pp. 168-9.
9The Nawab was jubilant: ‘There are many good things in store for
us which will no doubt come to us by and by, and the Mahomedans
being the largest in number in the New Province, they will have the
largest share . . . This is the golden opportunity which God and His
Prophet have offered us, but if we do not now profit ourselves by the
opportunity, we may not get another chance. Now or never. Our destiny
is in our hands. We must strike while the iron is hot.’ (K. Salimolla,
‘The New Province—its future possibilities’, Journal of the Moslem
nstitute, Vol. I, No. 4, April-June 1906, pp. 410-11.)
90 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The British rejected the Congress demand for parliamentary

institutions, retaining the consultative councils composed of
representatives of interest groups and communities. The right of
election was conceded but the Muslims were provided with
separate electorates. The right of Indians to serve on the highest
executive councils of the Empire was also conceded, but the
Muslims secured defacto recognition of their claim that these
appointments should be communally apportioned.
For almost a decade the arrangement with the British
worked well, but like all systems of patronage this one depended
upon the maintenance of a fine balance between the interests
of patron and client. In this case the balance would be
disturbed if the British considered that it was in their interest
to make concessions to communities other than the Muslims,
and by 1910 there were officials in Calcutta and London who
were convinced that it was no longer politic to disregard Hindu
bhadralok anger at British policies in Bengal. In the search for
a‘boon’with which King George V might crown his Indian
visit in 1911 they hit upon the idea of reuniting the province.
The announcement of this decision at the King’s durbar in
Delhi in December 1911 appalled the Bengal Muslims. The
British, it seemed, had performed a volte face to pacify the
Hindu extremists, and many of the younger Muslims were
convinced that after this betrayal there could be no question
of maintaining the old loyalist stance. Others, equally angry,
were determined to squeeze every possible concession from
the British as indemnity for their treachery,10 but the Nawab
of Dacca cautioned both groups against rash action. He was
as perturbed as any of his followers at the loss of their
province, but he could see no viable alternative to a policy of
dependence on the British. He agreed that the Muslims
should be given reparations for their loss, but he also emphasized
that it would be a mistake to offened the Government by
pressing too hard. The Muslims had to maintain the right

10E.g. see demands of Central National Mahomedan Association’s

Committee of Management, Statesman, 23 January 1912; and Crewe to
Carmichael, 15 January 1912, Carmichael, Lord Carmichael, pp. 150-2.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 91

balance between their demands and their expressions of

loyalty.11
It was essential to the success of this scheme that they
should, at all times, have leaders close enough to the Govern¬
ment to sense when the time was right to tip the seesaw one
way or other. Fortunately for his plans the Nawab found the
new Governor of Bengal, Lord Carmichael, keen to receive him
as a friend and they were soon on intimate terms.12 The
Muslims had two other links with the Government in the
persons of Nawab Khan Bahadur Saiyid Nawab Ali Chaudhuri,
a large zamindar from Mymensingh and an elected member of
the Bengal Legislative Council, who had a number of close
contacts among the senior officials, and Nawab Syed Shamsul
Huda, a High Court lawyer and a member of a great land-
holding family in Tippera, whom Carmichael appointed to his
Executive Council. Both men had formerly been members of
Eastern Bengal & Assam Legislative Council, where they had
proved themselves adept exponents of the Dacca Nawab’s game
of balance.
Once again the courtiers gained favours for their community.
When they emphasised Muslim educational backwardness,
they were rewarded with the appointment of a separate
educational officer for Eastern Bengal and the elaboration of
plans for the provision of special facilities for Islamic studies
in the proposed Dacca University.13 Huda urged his fellow
Executive Councillors to raise the proportion of Muslims in
government service, and at his bidding a circular was issued
to subordinate offices instructing that no qualified Muslim
candidate should be rejected in favour of a better-qualified
Hindu until one-third of all posts in Bengal were held by
Muslims.14
Despite successses such as these, however, the courtier
no longer had the united backing of their community, for

“For an example of his application of this, see his speech in the

Legislative Council, 3 April 1914, Proceedings, Vol. XLVI, pp. 619-21.
12Ibid., 19 January 1915, Vol. XLVII, pp. 3-8; and Carmichael to
Crewe, 25 February 1915, Carmichael, Lord Carmichael, p. 204.
13Statesman, 3 and 4 February 1912.
“Government of Bengal, Appointment Department Proceedings,
September 1917, File 4M-4 (1-2), September 1917.
92 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

there were now influential Muslim politicians who questioned

the premises on which the loyalist strategy rested. After the
death of Dacca Nawab in January 1915 the Government felt
that there was no Muslim leader on whom it could fully rely
for an expression of the community’s views, and the old
rapport was destroyed.15 A year later Carmichael and Percy
Lyon, the pro-Muslim former Chief Secretary of Eastern
Bengal & Assam, left the Bengal Government, and their
successors were less willing to show favouritism to the
Muslims.16 Huda’s term on the Executive Council expired in
June 1917 and his seat was given to the Hindu bhadralok
lawyer, S.P. Sinha, the immediate past-president of the Indian
National Congress. The Bengal Muslims had lost their
spokesmen at court.
The timing could not have been worse, for in August 1917
Edwin Montagu made his fateful declaration on Indian self-
government. The destruction of the consultative system and
its replacement with a parliamentary structure, which the
old-guard Muslim politicians had always feared, seemed
imminent, and at this moment when it was most important for
them to be able to influence British decisions they had lost
their channels of confidential access to the Government. One
of the community’s political strategies had failed. So had the
other.

Ill

This second strategy had its origins in Muslim anger at the

reunification of Bengal. As we have seen, the Nawab of
Dacca had tried to contain this anger, but his cautions were
rejected by a number of the younger Muslim professional men
in Calcutta. Their retort was that the annulment of the
partition showed that the British officials could not be trusted
to deal fairly with the community and that the Muslims must
adopt a more aggressive stance if they were to improve their lot.
The Nawab and his supporters managed for more than a year

15Carmichael to Crewe, 25 February 1915, Carmichael, Lord Carmi¬

chael, p. 204.
10Government of Bengal, Appointment Department Proceedings, File
4M-4 (1-2), A30-31, September 1917.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 93

to prevent any public statement of this dissent, but in a debate

in the Bengal Legislative Council on 4 April 1913 Fazlul Huq,
a young Muslim representative from Dacca, brushed aside the
polite conventions of his aristocratic elders, and in a powerful
extempore speech warned the Government that continued
failure to heed Muslim demands would lead to trouble.
However much the Government might deny it, the Muslims
were entitled to compensation for their past ill-treatment, he
declared.

To me it seems that Government has arrived at a parting

of the ways, and has got to decide, once for all, its future
policy regarding questions affecting the Muhammadan
community .... in spite of their aversion to agitation,
Muhammadans are drifting, owing to sheer force of
circumstances, into the arena of political warfare. We feel
that we have got to move with the times or else we are
doomed. Let not the officials think that the feelings of the
entire community can be soothed simply by the bestowal of
titles and decorations on our leaders, or by providing for a
transitory stay of the officials at Dacca with all the para¬
phernalia of Government. We require something more
than a mere concession to our sentiments, something tangi¬
ble which can be reasonably set off against our loss by the
annulment of the Partition.17

Shamsul Huda was quickly on his feet to deny the truth of

what he euphemistically described as this ‘pessimistic view’,18
but the response which Huq’s speech drew from various
sections of the Muslim community suggested that there were
many who thought as he did. The attention which the speech
attracted throughout the province, left no doubt that a new
political reputation had been made.
Huq is an important figure for the political historian of this
period, for he brought a new style to Muslim politics in
Bengal. Born of a family of Barisal vakils, he followed the
well-worn path to Calcutta for education, finishing on the

17Proceedings, Vo!. XLV, pp. 576-31.

islbid., pp. 595-6.
94 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

benches of the elite Presidency College. In 1895 at the age of

twenty-two he returned to Barisal with an M.A. and B.L. to
teach in the local college, and later he assisted his father
with his legal practice. After five years Calcutta drew him
back and he became an articled clerk to the great High Court
lawyer, Asutosh Mookerjee. The discussion over the partition
found him keenly supporting the measure and his first
opportunity for political work came in 1906 when the Nawab
of Dacca used him as a runner in his negotiations with Muslim
leaders in other parts of northern India prior to the formation
of the Muslim League. The Nawab had at his disposal a
number of Government appointments in the new Eastern
province and he was thus able to reward Huq with a place in the
Provincial Executive Service. By 1908 he had become Assistant
Registrar of Rural Co-operative Societies. At the time of
reunification, however, he was aggrieved at his non-appoint¬
ment as Registrar for the whole of Bengal, and he left the
service in disgust. Again the Nawab came to his aid, ensuring
his unopposed return for the Dacca Muslim seat in the
Legislative Council.19
Here was a potential Muslim leader of anew kind. Unlike the
traditional communal leader, whose influence was locally based
on landholding and who was usually a member of one of the
great aristocratic families, Huq had made his way by personal
ability—for it was his ability which had won him the necessary
patronage. His education and his experience in teaching, law.
administration, and political organisation set him apart from
the old leadership, and, wnat was vital, made him acceptable
to the Hindu bhadralok. Here was a Muslim who (to adapt
W.S. Gilbert) was the very model of a modern politician. It
was important too, that while retaining his contacts with his
Eastern Bengal district he had established himself as a figure
in Calcutta, for this enabled him to provide communal leader¬
ship on two levels.
To the Government, in search of spokesmen for a dependent
Muslim community, Western-educated professional men such

19For biographical details see obituary, The Times, (London) 28

April 1962; and Indian Year Book and Who's Who, 1939-40, (Calcutta &
jjombay 1940).
1HE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 95

as Fazlul Huq were unacceptable, but this was of little concern

to them. They had no desire to be courtiers, for unlike the
older generation their anger, personal and communal, was
directed primarily at the Government. Huq and his followers
scoffed at the credulity of those who would rely on British
protestations of good faith, and, at the same time, they insisted
that there was no longer any need for the Muslim community
to eschew politics, for it now had an educated elite which could
hold its own with Hindus or British. They even questioned
the wisdom of the old orthodoxy of unremitting Muslim
hostility to the National Congress These new middle-class
Muslim politicians shared with the Western-educated of other
communities, nationalist aspirations quite foreign to the old
leaders, and, while still protesting their primary commitment
to their community, they were willing to consider collaboration
with Hindu nationalists in campaigns against the British.
Their inclination to collaborate was encouraged by a number
of factors. First, the anger in their community at the reunifica¬
tion of Bengal was reinforced in 1914 by concern at Turkey s
alliance with Germany in the war against England. Indian
Muslims accepted the Sultan of Turkey, the Khalifa, as the
leader of all Islam, and the fact that he was now at war with
Great Britain imposed a strain on their loyalty to the British
raj, especially as Pan-Islamic sentiment was then unusually
strong.20
The outbreak of war also brought appeals from Congressmen
for a Hindu-Muslim alliance. In India, as elsewhere in the
British Empire. August 1914 sent a wave of excitement and
hope through the educated classes. There was talk of a short
and glorious campaign, to be followed by a readjustment of
international relations, in the forefront of which would be a
new partnership of the nations of the British Empire. A new
conception of India caught the imagination of many Indian
nationalists: a self-governing India taking its place as an
equal beside the other British dominions in an Imperial
federation. In preparation for the constitutional discussions
which, they thought, could not be long delayed, these nationa¬
lists drew up reform proposals and sought endorsement for

20Native Papers, September-December 1914.

96 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

them from Muslim as well as Hindu politicians. They believed

that a united demand from the two communities would
command greatest attention.21 Their hopes for a quick
settlement were soon blighted, but the reform initiative was
not lost and they found the younger Muslim politicians res¬
ponsive to their appeals.
In Bengal the death of the Nawab of Dacca in January
1915 opened the way to greater influence for this new group
of middle-class professional men, and in the following twelve
months they gained control of the Bengal Presidency Muslim
League, with Fazlul Huq as secretary.22 They were now able
to implement a new strategy. The political future of the Bengal
Muslim community, as they saw it, lay in a nationalist alliance
with the Hindu bhadralok against the common enemy, the
British. The aim was to wrest power from the British and
this power was to be divided according to a prearranged
scheme which would give the Muslims their fair share.
It was on this basis that Fazlul Huq and his men entered
into a series of negotiations with Congressmen and Muslim
Leaguers from other provinces which produced a reform
scheme jointly adopted by the Congress and the Muslim
League at Lucknow in December 1916. The Lucknow Pact,
as this was called, was based on a memorial presented to the
Viceroy in October 1916 by nineteen non-official members of
the Imperial Legislative Council, calling for Representative
Government and Dominion Status for India. To secure
Muslim support, clauses were added at Lucknow providing
separate electorates for the Muslims and giving Legislative
Councillors the right to veto legislation affecting their own
community. In addition the proportion of seats which the
Muslims should have in each of the provincial Councils was
detailed, and in five of the seven provinces they were accorded
considerable over-representation on the principle that the
minority community should have weightage. On the same princi¬
ple the Hindus were to be over-represented in the Councils of

nE.g. see the scheme of reforms and accompanying comments pub¬

lished by Surendranath Banerjea Bengalee, 2 July 1915.
a2Government of Bengal, Political Department Proceedings, ‘List of
Office-Bearers of Recognized Associations’, 1915 and 1916.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 97

the two Muslim majority provinces, the Punjab and Bengal.23

The Lucknow Pact was a remarkable diplomatic victory
for the Muslim League and it was hailed as such by the Muslim
press, except in Bengal where the concessions on Hindu
representation in the local Legislative Council were denounced
as a betrayal of the community’s interests. By population the
Bengal Muslims were entitled to 52.6 per cent of the Council
seats but the Lucknow Pact would give them only 40 per
cent.24 There was great anger at those who had agreed to
such disadvantageous terms. The young Muslim Leaguers
were accused of selling out their community to the Hindus,
and there was a reaction against collaboration. ‘Those
who apprehend that the Moslems will suffer political death if
they do not unite with the Hindus are greatly mistaken,’
declaimed a Calcutta Urdu daily, the Resalat. ‘We have
already stood alone 1,300 years. What is wanted is that we
should firmly abide by our religious laws and not become
faint-hearted.’20
It was on this issue that debate among the Bengal Muslim
leaders turned in 1917. The supporters of the Congress-League
Pact insisted that the first aim of all Indians should be to force
the British to yield power while its opponents maintained that

23Indian Statutory Commission. Vol. IV, Memoranda Submit.ed by

the Government of India and the India Office, (London 1930), pp. 138-40.
2JHow badly the Bengal Muslims had fared compared with their
co-ieligionists in other provinces can be judged from the following figures
{ibid., p. 139):

(1) (2) (3) (4)

% of total
Muslim % cf Legislative seats % (3)
Province Population for Muslims of (2)

Bengal 52.6 40.0 76

Bihar and Orissa 10.5 25.0 238
Bombay 20.4 33.3 163
C.P. 4.3 15.0 349
Madras 6.5 15.0 231
Punjab 54.8 50.0 91
U.P. 14.0 50.0 214

2517 April 1917.

98 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

the protection of communal interests was the paramount duty of

Muslim leaders. Montagu’s declaration in August, bringing as
it did the need for action, only added to the acrimony of the
dispute.26
It was settled quite suddenly, however, by communal rioting
in Bihar late in September. When the Muslims of Shahabad
District attempted to perform their traditional cow-sacrifice on
the Baqr-Id, they were attacked by Hindus. The nature and
■extent of the rioting which followed, more fierce and prolonged
than any which previously had occurred in British times,
suggested a premeditated attempt on the part of the local
Hindus to put an end to cow-sacrifice in the district.27
This had serious repercussions on communal relations in
neighbouring areas of northern India. In Bengal, where excite¬
ment was already running high at the prospect of constitutional
reform, the Muslim leaders hurled the accusation of treachery
at their Hindu opposites. Here, they declaimed, was an example
of the use to which the Hindus would put any power they
could wring from the British. This was a foretaste of Hindu
raj.28 All talk of collaboration was drowned in a wave of
communal bitterness, and the old religious animosity of the
two communities was swept to the surface. ‘In the West
religion and politics can be separated but in the East never/
declared the Sadaqat,29
It was in this atmosphere of recrimination that the Bengal
Muslims set about drawing up their submissions for Montagu
and the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, who were shortly to tour
India to discuss constitutional reform. Already there had
been a number of defections from the ranks of the provincial
Muslim League of those who repudiated the Lucknow Pact.
The Central National Muhammadan Association, a Calcutta
organisation of long standing which had formerly concerned
itself primarily with Muslim education, offered these men an
alternative body through which to work. They persuaded the
Association to form a Constitutional Reforms Sub-Committee,

26Native Papers, January-September 1917.

21Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. IV, pp. 97-8.
25Native Papers, October 1917.
2922 November 1917.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 99

of which they took command.30 They then prepared an

address to Montagu and Chelmsford in its name, attacking the
Lucknow Pact and demanding legislative representation for
the Bengal Muslims in proportion to their population. The
spirit of their submissions was characterised by the concluding
sentence of the address: ‘For England now to place the Indian
Moslems, without proper, definite, and ample safeguards,
under the heels of a hostile non-Moslem majority, would,
your humble memorialists venture respectfully to submit, be a
cruel act of breach of faith and violation of trust.’31
In November the same group of League defectors, under the
leadership of Golam Husain Cassim Ariff and Dr. Abdulla-al-
Mamum Suhrawardy, formed a new and specifically political
organisation of their own, the Indian Moslem Association,32
and drew up another address. Its tone was more extreme. It
emphasised its authors’ determination to secure communal
advantages at any cost, and it characterised the Lucknow
agreement as a snare and a delusion for Muslims and British
alike. ‘Indeed the ink of the compact of fraternity itself has
been washed away by the blood of the victims of the Bakri-Id
riots at Arrah and the Ram-Lila Moharrum disturbances at
Allahabad.’33
In the provincial Muslim League the supporters of the Pact
were now unchallenged but they were uncomfortably aware
of the unpopularity of the Pact’s provisions for Bengal and
the consequent danger for them of being left out on a polit¬
ical limb. They attempted to save themselves by advocating a
modification of the scheme to give the Bengal Muslims 50
per cent of the Council seats,34 and, at the same time, with
the assistance of some United Provinces members of the
League, they started a new Urdu daily in Calcutta to support
the scheme in this modified form.3°
Thus when Montagu and Chelmsford came to Calcutta in

30Central National Mahommedan Association, Calcutta, Octennial

Report, 1917-1924, (Calcutta 1925), pp. 5-6.
31PP, 1918, [Cd 9178], Vol. XVIII, pp. 498-9.
32Mohammadi, 2 November 1917; and Tirmizee, 25 November 1917.
33PP, 1918, [Cd 9178], Vol. XVIII, p. 504.
SiNative Papers, November 1917.
3bSadaqat, 14 November 1917.
 100 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

December 1917, the three Muslim associations were united in

their opposition to the representation provisions of the Lucknow
Pact and all were demanding more generous treatment for
their community. Montagu had little sympathy with this
demand. He believed that constitutional protection for minori¬
ties, particularly for large minorities like the Muslims, en¬
couraged their separatist tendencies, and at the same time,
discouraged them from making the effort to stand on their
own feet in politics.36 He was eager to do away with commu¬
nal electorates but reluctantly discarded this idea when he
realised the strain which such a reversal of British policy
would impose on Muslim loyalty.37 In the joint report which
Chelmsford and he presented to Parliament in July 1918, he
did make it clear, however, that he disapproved of communal
representation in principle, and emphasised that he would not
agree to its extension, or even to its maintenance in any pro¬
vince where the Muslims formed a majority of the voters/38
The Bengal Muslim leaders were aghast at the implications
of this for their community. If the British accepted the pro¬
visions of the Lucknow Pact as a fair basis for the distribution
of seats in the new legislative councils, as the Montagu-Chelms-
ford report suggested they might, the Bengal Muslims would
not be given a representation proportionate to their overall
numerical majority, and yet, if Montagu had his way, that
majority would be made the excuse for depriving them of their
separate electorates. There were vehement protests from the
political associations. ‘My Committee have carefully studied
the Constitutional Scheme in all its aspects and apprehend
that its working in its present shape would be disastrous to
Moslem interests, and lead to the political extinction of a
great and historic community in India,’ the secretary of the
Central National Muhammadan Association told the Govern¬
ment of Bengal.39

36Edwin S. Montagu, An Indian Diary, (London 1930), pp. 100 &

115.
37Ibid., p. 68.
38 Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, (Calcutta 1918)
pp. 147-9.
39Honorary Secretary, Central National Muhammadan Association to
Chief Secretary, Government of Bengal 12 September 1918, Government
 THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 101

IV

The Bengal Muslims were indeed in a desperate position.

At this crisis in Indian constitutional development, with the
future of their community hanging in the balance, they were
faced with the failure of both courses of action which they had
pursued in the preceding decade. The courtiers were out of
court and the collaborators had unwittingly bound the commu¬
nity to an agreement which now threatened its political future.
Faced with this alarming failure of their efforts the politicians
W'ere at a loss for constructive suggestions. Throughout July
and August 1918 they talked despairingly of the ‘political
extinction’ of their community. They accused the British and
the bhadralok of a desire to cripple its strength, and they
accused one another of treachery.40
There could have been no worse moment for such a display
of weakness, for the Muslim community in Bengal needed the
reassurance of firm leadership. Among its educated members,
the unwelcome tone of the Montagu-Chelmsford report and
the increasingly extreme demands of the Hindu nationalists
were the cause of grave anxiety. To the orthodox Muslims, the
defeats suffered by Turkey and the widely credited rumours that
Britain intended to depose the Khalifa were the cause of deep
concern,41 while the mass of the community was suffering
from the effects of a bad harvest, heavy flooding due to an
early monsoon and extraordinarily high prices for cotton goods.
Added to all this were the ravages of the great influenza
epidemic, which had struck Bengal in July 1918.42
With this general unrest and a demoralised leadership, the
commnnity was an easy prey for extremist agitators and a
group of such men were on hand to take advantage of the
opportunity. Their leaders were three non-Bengalis—a Punjabi,
Habib Shah, a Madrasi, Kalami, and a Bihari, Fazlur Rahman—
whose chief influence was among the Urdu-speaking immigrant

of India Home Department Public Branch Reforms Office Proceedings,

Deposit 15, July 1919.
i0Native Papers, July-August 1918.
n Ibid.
42Census of India, 1921, Vol. V, Pt i, pp. 30-1; and Proceedings of
the Bengal Legislative Council, Vol. L, passim.
102 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

community of Calcutta: the Muslim traders, manufacturers

and lower-class factory labourers.43
Throughout 1918 these men had been looking for a chance to
stir up trouble and they saw September as their best opportu¬
nity, for in that month the Muslim Bakr-ld would coincide
with the Hindu Durga Puja. Such a concurrence of religious
festivals always brought the likelihood of communal disorder,
and, with bitter memories of the previous year’s rioting in
Bihar still fresh in Muslim minds, the situation on this occasion
promised to be unusually explosive.
The Muslim press was busy whipping up discontent. The
Bihar riots were frequently mentioned, with heavy underscoring
of the moral: ‘The Moslems should be on their guard in time
this year.’44 Hoarders were blamed for the prohibitive price
of cotton goods and the finger of accusation was pointed at
the Marwaris.
This money-lending Hindu and Jain community, which
came from the Rajputana states, had established itself in force
in Calcutta in the preceding decade.45 In trade its members
worked in closely-knit family groups, and, with their flair for
a good speculation combined with a large measure of un¬
scrupulous dealing, they had quickly secured an important
position in Bengal commerce. Communally exclusive and
religiously ultraorthodox, they kept aloof from both the
Muslims and Hindus in Bengal, which did nothing to dispel
the jealousy and mistrust which their rapid success had
engendered. They offended the Muslims, in particular, by
their deep aversion to cow-slaughter, and it was an unfortunate
accident of geography that threw together large numbers of
both communities in the overcrowded lanes around Burra
Bazar in central Calcutta. By August 1918 the Marwaris of
of this area were aware of the hostility surrounding them, and,
fearing looting of their warehouses should rioting break out in
September, they imported up-country guards. This was noted

43Lawrence, Marquess of Zetland, Essayez (London, 1956),

pp. 112-13.
44Mohammadi, 6 September 1918.
i5Census of India, 1921, Vo). V, Pt i, pp. 132-3; and Vol. VI, Pt i,
p. 32.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 103

with disfavour in the Bengali press.46

The situation was perfect for the Muslim agitators. All
they had to do was to strike the spark which would ignite this
tinder. Habib Shah was the incendiary. At the beginning of
August in his Urdu paper, the Naqqash, he took exception to
a paragraph published a few days earlier in the Indian Daily
News, on the ground that it contained an offensive reference
to the prophet Muhammad. This created a furore. The other
Muslim papers joined the Naqqash in its attack and on 4
August the Bengal Presidency Muslim League called upon the
Government to institute proceedings against the editor of the
Indian Daily News. At a public meeting six days later there
was wild talk of a holy war against the infidel, and it was
decided to call an all-India gathering of Muslims in Calcutta
for 8 and 9 September to consider the religious and political
future of the community. ‘At this moment, Moslems are
being attacked from all sides,’ wrote the Naqqash. ‘They say
that their feelings are hurt by everybody. But the mere expres¬
sion of such a sentiment will not stop the mouths of the
enemies of Islam. Practical steps should be taken. They
should act on the motto, iron must be hammered by iron.’47
Moderate Muslim politicians were becoming alarmed by the
trend of events but they were reluctant to denounce the agitators
publicly lest this endanger their personal popularity and in
some way favour their rivals. They became a little more
resolute when they found themselves excluded by the extremists
from the reception committee which was formed after the
meeting of 10 August to organise the following month’s
demonstration, but even then they would risk nothing more
than a confidential appeal to the Government to prohibit the
rally.
The Government of Bengal was slow to recognise the
gravity of the situation. It handled the affair of the Indian
Daily News ineptly and provided much ammunition for the
Muslim press before the Government of India intervened to
persuade the Daily News editor to publish an apology. The
Governor, Lord Ronaldshay, was absent from Calcutta and

i6Native Papers, July-August 1918.

47Naqqash, 15 August 1918.
104 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

it was not until his return at the end of August that his
Government considered the matter of the all-India rally.
Twelve Muslim leaders were then called to discuss the question
with the Executive Council. The representatives of the recep¬
tion committee denied any intention of fomenting trouble,
but their moderate opponents accused them of deceit and
favoured cancelling the gathering. At Ronaldshay’s request
the reception committee met that evening to reconsider its
decision but it used the occasion as an excuse to heap abuse
on the heads of the moderates for what it described as their
collusion with the Government.
In the meantime there had been much inflammatory
writing in the Muslim press and a number of religious leaders
arrived in Calcutta from other parts of northern India. On 4
September the Government banned the gathering, ordered the
up-country ulemas and maulanas to leave Bengal, and stopped
the publication of the Naqqash and a number of other Muslim
papers. The reception committee, in defiance of the order,
went ahead with its arrangements.
Most of the moderates were now thoroughly frightened and
some went as far as requesting police protection. An exception
was Fazlul Huq. For ten days from 26 August he had been
absent in Bombay attending the special sessions of the
Congress and Muslim Teague called to consider the Montagu-
Chelmsford report, and on his return he had been confined to
bed with a fever. As soon as he recovered he made an effort
to ensure that the Government’s order would be obeyed.
Speaking to a meeting of the reception committee on the
evening of 7 September, he persuaded all but three of its
members to abandon the rally. The three were Habib Shah,
Kalami and Fazlur Rahman.
On the following day a crowd of five or six thousand
Muslims assembled at the site of the rally but they dispersed
when they were told that the Government had granted another
interview to the reception committee for the next afternoon.
On the morning of the 9th word spread through the city that
trouble was brewing in Burra Bazar, and a report on the
ugly temper of the crowd around the Nakhoda Mosque brought
an order from Government House for the armed police to
stand by. Fazlul Huq hurried to the Police Commissioner to
 THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 105

ask for permission to talk with the mob, by then advancing

towards Government House, but this was refused and instead
force was used to stop the march. Within two hours the
situation was beyond the control of reasoned appeals or police
lathis, and Calcutta was exposed to three days of lawlessness.48

For 1918 this course of events was novel and alarming.

Before men of property in general and the Marwaris in partic¬
ular, it raised an awful vision of the disastrous possibilities
of a breakdown of law and order in the face of a malcontent
or fanatical rabble. They were uncomfortably aware that in
some way the stability of Indian society had been shaken in
the war years. The small delegation of businessmen—
Marwaris, Bengali Hindus and Muslims—which Byomkes
Chakravarti, a prominent Congressman, led to the Writers’
Building on 17 September to thank the Government for
suppressing the riots,49 was expressive of a concern for what
was to come as much as of relief for what was past.
The political implications of the riots were equally disturb¬
ing. Certainly the aims of the agitators were not clearly
defined, but this did not alter the fact that in its organisation
the 1918 rioting differed in kind from most previous commu¬
nal disorders. Habib Shah and his fellows were engaged in
a political contest in which they used violence and the threat
of violence against their opponents. The organisations through
which they worked were political, and they played upon
political as well as communal grievances.
Their success showed that there was now latent mass dis¬
content which could be exploited for personal or communal
advantage by unscrupulous politicians. This gave new signi¬
ficance to the numerical strength of the Muslim community,
and forced the basic fact of its majority on the attention of
the British, the bhadralok and the Bengali Muslim politicians—

48The account of the riot and the events leading up to it, given in
the preceding paragraphs and at the beginning of the paper, is based on
Zetland: Essayez, pp. 108-16; and Report of the Non-Official Commission
on the Calcutta Disturbances, (Calcutta, 1919), pp. 4-29.
49Bangali and Nayak, 18 September 1918.
106 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

courtiers and collaborators alike—all of whom had been acting

as though they had forgotten that majority.
There were other lessons to be learnt from the riot. In the
first place it had shown the Muslim politicians that a resort
to violence could provide a means of expressing their anger
and frustration when other forms of action had failed. More¬
over it was apparent that the mere threat of violence could
force the British and the Hindu bhadralok to pay more serious
attention to Muslim demands. Violence had been proved an
effective mode of political action, and the techniques for
promoting it had been well noted. Future Muslim agitators
appreciated all too well the response which could be evoked
with the watchcry: ‘Islam in danger’, and they valued the
agency of the mullahs in sounding the alarm. They understood
the importance of the mosque as a rallying point, of the
migrant groups of the bustee areas as a source for rioters, of
the Marwaris as an alien and unpopular object of violence, and
of the vernacular press as a medium for incitement.
Obviously violence in Calcutta was a sword which the
Muslims might use against their communal opponents, but it
was a double-edged sword. As this riot had shown, the
instigators of an outbreak could never be certain that they
would be able to control the disorderly elements which they
had set loose, and when the rabble got out of hand no one
was free from danger, certainly no one of property. The size of
the city; the overcrowding of its older areas, with their jumbled
maze of narrow lanes and alley-ways; the mixed racial and
religious composition of its population; its drifting and unstable
migrant section; its large criminal class; its spectacula
inequalities of wealth and opportunity; its influential yellow
press—all of these factors contributed to the exceptional
difficulty of maintaining order in Calcutta or of arresting dis¬
order once it had begun. And this problem of law and order
was a matter of concern for politicians as well as police. After
the September 1918 riot no Bengali political leader could
ever again disregard the possibility that extreme action on his
part might provoke mass violence in Calcutta, with possibly
disastrous consequences.
The Government of Bengal was shaken by what had
happened. Clearly it had misjudged the situation. Its initial
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 107

hesitation, and its later reliance upon police and troops to the
exclusion of assistance from Muslim leaders, almost certainly
cost lives. Its actions were censured by both the Government
of India and a non-official commission of inquiry,00 and the
Governor, Lord Ronaldshay, writing his memoirs thirty years
later, still felt the need for a lengthy apologia.51 Some good
came of the affair. Apart from a reorganisation ol aimed
police in Calcutta in an attempt to obviate the use of troops,
there was a realisation among the officials that new forces
were at work in Bengal society and that the politics of the
post-war years promised to be very different from those of the
past.52

VI

The events of August and September left many reputations

tarnished. The willingness of most of the Muslim politicians
to subordinate public duty to considerations of personal
advantage and security, their preoccupation with petty intrigue
and factionalism, had been plain for all to see.
Fazlul Huq had come through the affair better than most,
but he was in disfavour with the bulk of his community
because of his persistent support of the Lucknow Pact. His
election to preside at the December 1918 session of the All-
India Muslim League won him few friends in Bengal, and his
characterisation, in his presidential address on that occasion,
of talk of Hindu raj as a ‘gross libel’53 was particularly unwel¬
come in the atmosphere of communal acrimony following the
Calcutta riot. Huq had tarred himself with the brush of
collaboration and it was a long time before he was forgiven.
‘He has a strong desire to gain a reputation among a
communities,’ wrote the Moslem Hitaishi contemptuously in
October 1919. ‘So he keeps himself in the good graces of a

60Zetland, Essayez, p. 116; and Report of the Non-Official Commis¬

sion, p. 29.
“Zetland, Essayez, pp. 108-16. n1s1Q
"Government of Bengal, Police Department Proceedings, B15-19,
File 2C (4-6), December 1918. .... . ■ ,
"Typescript collection of Fazlul Hue’s speeches compiled by Az.zul

Huq, Dacca.
108 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

certain section of Moslems and is ready, without the least

hesitation, to sacrifice Moslem communal interests in order to
win fame and position among the Hindus.’64
What the Bengal Muslims were looking for late in 1918
was not a leader who would compromise, but one who would
put communalism before all else in the battle which was about
to be fought over Muslim legislative representation. The man
who supplied the need was Nawab Khan Bahadur Saiyid
Nawab Ali Chaudhuri, the Eastern Bengal representative in
the Imperial Legislative Council.55 He had much to recommend
him. A Bengali and a great landholder, he stood apart from
the IJrdu-speaking group in Calcutta which had been chiefly
responsible for the recent troubles. At that time he had spoken
out strongly against the encouragement of violence56 and yet
had retained the appearance, at least, of non-involvement in
the various intrigues.
More important, at no stage in his career had he had
dealings with the nationalists. He was a communalist first and
last. When the non-official members of the Imperial Legislative
Council drew up their memorial on reforms in 1916, he had
refused to sign on the ground that Muslim interests were not
explicitly protected.57 He had resigned the presidency of the
provincial Muslim League in 1917 because of the terms of the
Lucknow Pact and in December had argued the case for his
community in a personal interview with Montagu and Chelms¬
ford.58
His main work lay before him. In August 1918 he was
elected president of the Central National Muhammadan
Association and immediately set about preparing submissions
for the two committees which were to consider schemes for a
new franchise, and for the division of functions between the
various branches of government. He regarded the address to
the Lunctions Committee as an opportunity for a public

6431 October 1919.

65For biographical details see Who Was Who, 1929-1940, (London,
1941).
66Zetland, Essayez, p. 111.
67Mohammadi, 20 October 1916.
'^Government of B.ngal, Appointment Department Proceedings,
B441-55, File 6R-1 (17), March 1919.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 109

protest against the ‘serfdom’ imposed upon the Muslims by the

Bengal Hindus. It would be suicidal for the Muslims to agree
to any scheme for the progressive realisation of self-govern¬
ment, the committee was told, for there was ‘no common
sentiment of nationality between the Moslem and the
Bengalee’.59
The evidence for the Franchise Committee was of more
practical importance, for the distribution of legislative seats
was still an open question. The Government of Bengal, pre¬
paring its recommendations, had come to the conclusion that
no satisfactory franchise qualification could be devised which
would give the Bengal Muslims a majority of voters and that,
this being so, they were entitled to separate electorates. It
accepted the Congress-League scheme as ‘a convenient solution’
of the problem of apportioning seats between the two commu¬
nities and recommended a Legislative Council for Bengal of 112
members. Fifty-nine of these should be elected from territorial
constituencies, with the Muslims providing 27 and the Hindus
32.60 The Central National Muhammadan Association strongly
opposed this suggestion. The Lucknow Pact was acceptable
for the rest of India, it asserted, but for Bengal it was unfair
to the Muslims. Their population entitled them to at least 50
per cent of the Council seats 61
The Franchise Committee did not agree. It accepted the
Govenment of Bengal’s argument for communal electorates
and its apportionment of 45 per cent of the territorial seats to
the Muslims.62
Chaudhuri had not appeared as a witness before either of
the committees but he had not been idle. As an old comrade
of the Dacca Nawab, he knew the value of personal intercession
at the highest level, and he had been active in Delhi talking
with members of the Government of India. He had insisted
that the Muslim League did not truly represent the Muslim
community in Bengal, and that the application of the Congress-
League scheme to the province would be regarded by his

59Jbid., A10-19, File 6R-18 (1-10), March 1919.

60Ibid., A94-152, File 6R-25 (1-59), December 1918.
61Evidence Taken before the Reforms Committee (Franchise), (Calcutta,
1919), Vol. II, P. 393.
 110 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

community as a betrayal similar to that of the annulment of

the partition in 1912.
He had spoken persuasively. ‘I have been much impressed
by the arguments which have since been addressed to the
Government of India by Saiyid Nawab Ali Chaudhuri,’ wrote
Sir William Vincent, the Home Member, in opposing the
Franchise Committee’s proposals.63 Vincent spoke for his
colleagues. They had all been impressed by Chaudhuri’s plea
and they insisted that the Bengal Muslims be given 44 seats
instead of the 34 recommended by the Franchise Committee.64
The question was referred back to the Government of Bengal,
with the request that it prepare a scheme to increase Muslim
representation, but it stood by its earlier recommendation that
45 per cent of the territorial seats was sufficient.60
Chaudhuri would not give up without a fight. Throughout
the remainder of 1919, by personal interviews and letters he
kept up his pressure on the members of the provincial and
Indian Governments.66 Through the Central National Muham¬
madan Association he organised Muslim conferences in
various parts of the province, at which resolutions were passed
disavowing the right of the Muslim League to speak for
Bengal and urging the British to honour their pledges to the
Muslim community.67 Forwarding a final note to the Govern¬
ment of Bengal on 10 January 1920, he warned of the consequ¬
ences of a failure to satisfy Muslim demands:

Any decision to adhere to the recommendation of the

Southborough [Franchise] Committee would leave the
moderate element among the Muhammadans practically
without any influence or following in the reformed Council

6'Reports of the Franchise Committee and the Committee on Division

of Functions, (Calcutta, 1919), pp. 9-10 & 52.
63Fifth Despatch on Indian Constitutional Reforms (Franchises),
(Calcutta, 1919), p. 388.
MIbid., p. 373.
65Government of Bengal, Appointment Department Proceedings,
Al-2, File 6R-34 (1-2), August 1919.
6°Ibid., A166-8B, File 6R-9 (1-3), February 1920; and Government of
India, Home Department Public Branch Reforms Office, B244-5,
January 1920.
67Octennial Report, 1917-1924, pp. 35-7.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORIUY 111

and in the country. Disappointed in securing what they

justly regard, and what was also confirmed by the very
mature and considerate decision of the Government of
India as the proper ratio of representation, the Mussalmans,
if they do not maintain a spirit of aloofness, will certainly
look with disfavour and rankling discontent on a constitu¬
tion in which, in spite of their numerical superiority, they
shall be in a decided political minority. Should the state
of things be left as they are, it does not require much
imagination to conceive their eventual capture by the
extremists to wreck the constitution.68

Chaudhuri's argument here is of great significance. He did

not approach the Government as a courtier, with a humble
petition for concessions in recognition of his community’s
loyalty. Nor did he take a stand with the bhadralok national¬
ists in demanding India’s just constitutional desserts. Instead
he drew the Government's attention to the fact that the
Muslims were in a majority in Bengal, and demanded the
constitutional recognition of that majority. As a sanction, he
added the comment that a failure to satisfy this demand
would endanger political order.
His appeal to the British was unsuccessful—only 45 per cent
of the territorial seats in the Bengal legislature were given to
the Muslims69—but his note was none the less important for
that. It recognised the crucial fact that in the new system
numbers would count. The small consultative council of the
past was about to be replaced by a large quasi-parliament,
controlling some departments of government and responsible
to a mass electorate. In place of the 28 members of the old
Legislative Council elected by 10,000 educated and propertied
voters, there were now to be 113 elected members with a total
enfranchised population of more than a million, of whom the
majority would be peasants 70 In mass politics numbers could

68Government of Bengal, Appointment Department Proceedings,

A166-8B, File 6R-8 (1-3), February 1920.
69PP, 1920, Cmd. 812, Vol. XXXV, pp. 295-9.
"Ibid., 1913, Cd 6714, Vol. XLVII, p. 199; ibid., 1920, Cmd 812,
Vol. XXXV, pp. 295-9; Government of Bengal, Appointment Depart¬
ment Proceedings, A94-152, File 6R-25 (1-59), December 1918; and
112 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

count in two ways. As September 1918 had shown they could

be made to count in a crude, negative fashion by provoking:
mob violence; or they could be made to count more positively
through electoral organisation. The vote or violence were the
implied alternatives in Chaudhuri’s note of 10 January 1920.
The vote and violence were to remain for Bengal Muslim
politicians the main alternative instruments of power through
the next three decades.
Violence was relatively easy to instigate and its advantages
were not limited to the occasion of the outbreak, for the
British and the Hindu bhadralok elite, fearful of disorder and
sensitive to the particular dangers of Calcutta, were susceptible
to the mere threat of a recurrence. Violence was always
difficult to control, however, and its results could never be
accurately predicted. It was a blunt and clumsy weapon.
By contrast the vote could be a keener instrument, but its
sophisticated use required organisation, both in the electorate
and in the legislature. Under the new constitution the provision
of communal electorates was a built-in incentive, where none
was needed, to organisation on communal lines, and the
politicians’ search for means of communication with the new
mass electorate also enhanced the value of the traditional
structure of communal authority: the institutions and symbols
of religion. The mullah, the mosque, and the call to defend
the Faith Were to become as much the stock-in-trade of the
Muslim M.L.C. as of the violent agitator. For the Muslim
politician it was one of the great advantages of separate
electorates that they reduced the demands on his technical
initiative which mass politics would otherwise have made.
Another advantage was the assurance which they gave of a
fixed minimum of seats in the legislature. While the 1919
constitution lasted, at least 39 of the 140 Legislative Councillors,
would always be Muslims.71 This was obviously not enough to
give them outright control of the Council, but with its
communally segmented constitution it was sufficient to enable
them to hold the balance of power, provided all would act

Indian Statutory Commission, Vol. VIII, Memorandum submitted by the

Government of Bengal, (London, 1930), p. 130.
71PP, 1920, Cmd 812, Vol. XXXV, pp. 295-9.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 113

together. Here was the rub. It proved rarely possible to

secure unity.
For one thing there were attractive opportunities of personal
gain for renegades at those critical moments when the balance
was held. For another, leadership disputes were chronic, and
the rivalry of contending factions was made keener by disagree¬
ments over social policy and political tactics. Nationalism
still vied with communalism for the allegiance of many, and
there were invariably a few Muslim members who could not
tolerate the alliance with the British which was necessary to
defeat the Hindus in the division lobbies. And how could the
backsliders be punished when party organisation outside the
legislature remained rudimentary because of the security
provided by separate electorates? The voters might reject a
wayward member if they were convinced that he was ‘not a
good Muslim’, but it was only at times of acute communal
tension that they could be persuaded to scrutinise the company
their representative was keeping in the Legislative Council.
For this reason there was always the temptation for the
community’s leaders to stir up trouble before an important
council vote or at election time.
Under the Montagu-Chelmsford constitution in Bengal it
was more often the organisation of the politicians than of the
voters which gave the Muslim leaders their headaches, and it
was a sign of what was ahead that Ali Chaudhuri should have
turned from his discussions with the Government in 1920 to
the task of marshalling his co-religionists in opposition to the
Congress call for a boycott of the legislatures. His appeal for
the Muslims to stand united and apart was to be echoed
through the years ahead:

Hitherto the whole history of India since the advent of

the Mussalmans in this country is a history of a continued
antagonism of the two communities and w'e need be very
cautious in clasping too eagerly the hand of fellowship
stretched forward so very gracefully by the other commu¬
nity. . . . We want in the Council chamber such men who
would by no means allow the Muslim interests to be
sacrificed for pleasing either the Government or the other
114 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

communities.72

VII

The most striking fact in this account is the Muslims’

assertion, at every point, of their community’s right to a
separate political existence. The strategies of politics, as we
have seen, were not constant; the type of Muslim politician
with influence varied; and the political system underwent
radical change. But this determination to maintain a distinct
political identity was throughout the basic factor in Muslim
thinking. The suggestion that the community should take its
place simply as one religious and cultural group in a diverse
Indian nation was never entertained, and we must ask why.
One immediate reason was the fact that there were ambitious
men with social influence who could convert that influence to
political power so long as the community had a recognised
political existence. Under the old consultative system the
influence of these men was underwritten by their nomination
as Muslim representatives in the Legislative Council, and when
election was introduced in 1909 their position was again
guaranteed through communal electorates. By 1919 the distinct
political organisation of the Muslim community was a fact
which neither the National Congress nor Edwin Montagu
could deny, and the massive extension of the franchise under
the constitution of that year provided new opportunities for
power for the politicians whose communal influence enabled
them to sway large numbers of men.
Another spur to separation was a genuine distrust of the
Congress by many Muslim politicians. Congress rule would
mean Hindu rule, they reasoned, and Hindu rule would be
intolerable for the Indian Muslims. If we ask why it would
be intolerable we come close to the heart of the problem of
Muslim separatist thinking. It would be intolerable, in the
first place, because of the history of Islam in India. The
memory of Muslim imperial rule . was cherished by the
community, and if the ambition to rule again was not universal,

72Syed Nawab Ali Chowdhry, Views on Present Political Situation in

India, (Calcutta, 1920), pp. 122 and 34-5.
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 115

a determination never to submit to the Hindus was certainly

widespread. It would be intolerable, secondly, because of its
inconsistency with the character of Islam itself. ‘An independ¬
ent political community as the arena of religious activity is
part of the very genius of Islam,’ Wilfred Cantwell Smith has
observed. ‘The existence of such a community is not some¬
thing peripheral; it lies close to the heart of the faith.’73
Another obvious feature of this period was the power of
the British to regulate the political relations of the Muslims
with other Indian communities, and the consequent attention
which the Muslim leaders gave to the British in developing
their political strategies. The courtiers depended upon an
alliance with the British; the collaborators experimented with
an alliance against them; and Ali Chaudhuri’s successors in
the twenties tried to hold a balance between the Government
and the nationalists. Always there was a fundamental diffi¬
culty: the British could be influenced but they could not be
controlled, and at almost any time they wished they could
reshape the entire political system. In these circumstances it
is not surprising that the Muslim politicians felt very insecure,
their insecurity manifesting itself in an exaggerated emphasis
upon ‘the special British obligation’ to the Muslims, and the
British ‘duty to honour their promises’ to the community. Nor
is it surprising that this insecurity should have turned to
despair when, as in July 1918, they felt that the British were
disregarding their interests.
The cause of the alarm on that, particular occasion was the
threatened loss of separate communal electorates, and this
underlines their significance in Muslim thinking throughout
this period. Securing separate electorates was regarded by the
newly formed Muslim League as its first task in 1906, and the
price which the nationalist Muslims asked of the Congress in
return for League support ten years later was endorsement of
the principle on which they rested. Before Montagu and
Chelmsford, every Muslim spokesman demanded their retention
with a vehemence which finally convinced the Secretary of
State that they could not be destroyed. Thus, despite repeated

73Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Islam in Modern History, (New York,

1959), p. 211.
116 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

British statements that they were incompatible with a parlia¬

mentary system, they were written into the 1919 constitution
and provided the framework of Muslim political organisation
until partition in 1947.
Why did the Muslims value separate electorates so highly?
First because they provided the clearest possible recognition
of the community’s distinct political existence, giving it
constitutional sanction. Secondly, because the Muslims thought
of themselves as a hopelessly outnumbered minority. On this
point one might expect Bengal, with its Muslim majority, to
have provided an exception, but there as elsewhere the
Muslim leaders usually stood forward as minority spokesmen.
The Bengal Muslims were, of course, part of a subcontinental
minority, and involved in a political system which encompassed
all of British India. As a result they remained vulnerable to
pressures from outside the province, even though their
numbers gave them power inside. The Lucknow Pact had
been an unhappy illustration of this fact.
To the proposition that their minority status entitled them
to separate electorates, they always added the rider that they
had to be given protection because they were ‘educationally
backward and economically poor’. There can be no question
that, compared with the Hindu bhadralok, the Muslims had a
very small share of Bengal’s landed property, higher education,
appointments in goverment service and the learned professions,
and positions in local self-government. The Muslim intelli¬
gentsia were convinced that, because of this inequality, the
bhadralok possessed such powers of persuasion and coercion
that they would dominate any open system of election. With¬
out separate electorates the Muslims would be shut out of
politics or would participate only on Hindu bhadralok
sufferance.
The irony of this situation lay in the fact that the Hindu
bhadralok politicians approached mass politics with trepidation,
for they had no confidence in their ability to persuade or
coerce the masses, particularly the peasant masses. By the
same token, the Muslim politicians discovered that they had
many technical advantages in the new system, and that the
sheer size of their community gave them great agitational and
electoral strength, which awaited only the perfection of those
THE FORGOTTEN MAJORITY 117

techniques for its realisation. For years their most eminent

men had exerted every effort to preserve the consultative struc¬
ture, and it was to their surprise that they discovered that they
had greater potential power under the parliamentary system
that had been forced upon them. That majority, which
earlier they had tried so hard to forget and which had seemed
in 1918 to provide their opponents with a handle to beat
them, was now gladly acknowledged.
 6

The Non-Cooperation Decision of 1920:

A Crisis in Bengal Politics

‘. . . through these travail pains a new self-respecting India is

being born—an India which will not bow the knee of every
occasion, but will stand upright and erect. It is good to be alive
in these days, even if one has not the heaven, which Words¬
worth speaks of, of being young.’1 With this letter written
from Santiniketan by C.F. Andrews to his colleague Rabindra¬
nath Tagore, we can recapture a sense of the enthusiasm and
optimism in its political future which gripped India in the last
months of 1920 as the Congress prepared to implement Gandhi’s
programme of non-cooperation. The spirit of this period has
been adequately conveyed in general historical writing, very
frequently through such metaphors as an upsurge of enthusiasm
or a wave of excitement sweeping the country. These figures
are not inappropriate, but they have the danger of all metaphors
of overgeneralising and oversimplifying, of distracting from
the details of the historical process and its timing. They have
not in this case obscured the fact that there were individuals and
groups, inside as well as outside the Congress, who opposed
Gandhi in 1920 and who were determined not to be swept off
their feet by any tide of passion. There has, however, been no

*1 November [1920], C.F. Andrews papers, Santiniketan.

THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 119

major attempt to measure the extent and significance of this

opposition, or to uncover its reasons. The result has been the
neglect of one of the crucial disputes in modern Indian potitical
history.
This essay examines the details of that dispute in one pro¬
vince. Its subject is Bengal politics in the twelve months
between the passage of the Government of India Act in December
1919 and the Nagpur session of the Indian National Congress
in the last days of 1920. It is concerned with a problem of
political strategy: the problem faced by the Bengal nationalist
leaders of whether or not to support non-cooperation. It is also
concerned with the themes of identity and order. For the
members of the Hindu elite, which led the nationalist movement
in Bengal, the events and decisions of 1920 called into question
the basic values of their social and political position. In that
critical year they were faced with the emergence of a new
national leader whose philosophy of politics was diametrically
opposed to their own at crucial points, and, simultaneously,
with an attack on their social ascendancy from aspiring groups
beneath them in Bengal society. As a consequence they were
forced, perhaps for the first time, to examine the foundations
upon which their separate group identity2 rested, and to defend
their conception of the social order. In 1920 the great issues of
this century for Bengal were debated.

On 23 December 1919 the royal assent was given to the

Government of India Bill. For the Extremist party, in undisput¬
ed command of the Congress since the Moderates’ withdrawal
sixteen months before, this posed a serious problem. Should
they persist in their opposition to the Montagu-Chelmsford
reforms or should they now accept them as a fait accompli and

2I define group identity in this way: A group with identity has

agreed values, understood internal relationships, accepted roles for
various members at developing stages of life, a language and channels
of communication, a shared interpretation of the past and hopes for
the future, common heroes, common symbols and common myths. The
members of such a group are aware of their membership, and the group
is identifiable by other groups and individuals in the society.
120 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

use their power to dominate the new institutions? Certainly their

reputation in the preceding two years had been built on their
steadfast rejection of all British reform proposals and their
condemnation of those Indians who were prepared to co-operate
with the British, but they could contend, with some degree
of truth, that this had been a stratagem to force the British to
yield more power. That game was played out (so the argument
ran) and the only result of a continued refusal to participate in
constitutional politics would be the loss of the field to ‘a tribe of
timid, little-souled people who will think of themselves first and
of their country last or not at all’.3 Even under the Morley-
Minto constitution, the Extremists had had qualms about leav¬
ing the legislative councils to the Moderates4 and the danger
seemed greater now that some of the functions of the provincial
Governments were to be transferred to Indian ministers.
On the other hand, the Extremists asked, w'as there any
reason to believe that participation in the new councils would be
more profitable than it had been in the old? No matter what
concessions had been made to Indian demands, the British
bureaucracy was still in command, and (the Extremists held) the
Amritsar tragedy of April 1919 had shown that it was as reac¬
tionary as ever. ‘If the fountain remains as it is,’ wrote Motilal
Ghose, ‘the addition of a few more conduits will not make the
water any more drinkable than it was.’5 What was needed was
a change of heart, and this, the Extremists maintained, had not
happened. The racial arrogance which had characterised British
Indian policy in the past, had been in evidence throughout the
reforms discussions. Even the basic assumption upon which the
Montagu-Chelmsford scheme rested: that Indians had yet to
learn the art of self-government, and its corollary: that they
should be given constitutional protection against their ignorance,
wei'e considered offensive.6
To accept the reforms, even under protest, would be to
acquiesce in this judgement of Indian inferiority and this would

3Amrila Bazar Patrika, 2 July 1920.

4E.g. see B.C. Pal, Nationality and Empire. A Running Study of
Some Current Indian Problems, (Calcutta, 1916), pp. 217-18.
5Amrita Bazar Patrika, 1 December 1919.
*Dainik Bharat Mitra, 12 July 1918, Dainik Basumati, 13 July 1918;
Amrita Bazar Patrika, 17 August 1918.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 121

injure the growth of national self-confidence. Many of the

Extremists believed that it was self-confidence, above all else,
that India needed. As a subject people, Indians had lost faith
in their ability to act independently. For nearly two centuries
they had been taught to distrust their own judgement and to
accept without demur the decrees of a paternalistic foreign
regime. To save their soul they had to repudiate the right of
others to think for them. They had to act for themselves.
*. . . what makes the difference between the Englishman and
you?’ Swami Vivekananda had asked his countrymen in 1897.

The difference is here, that the Englishman believes in him¬

self, and you do not. He believes in his being an Englishman
and he can do anything. . . . You have been told and taught
that you can do nothing and nonentities you are becoming
every day. What we want is strength, so believe in yourselves.
. . What we want is muscles of iron and nerves of steel.
We have wept long enough. No more weeping, but stand on
your feet and be men.7

Vivekananda had a profound influence upon the development

•of twentieth-century Indian political and social thought, and
his gospel of national self-assertion found a particularly rich soil
in his native Bengal, where the ground had been prepared by the
novels of Bankim Chandra Chatterjce. His teachings were given
political application by Aurbindo Chose, Bepin Chandra Pal and
Rabindranath Tagore, who called upon their compatriots to
prove their manhood by defying British power. This was the
philosophy which had inspired the swadeshi and national educa¬
tion movements, and the terrorists at the time of the partition
of Bengal, and it was the underlying reason for the Extremists’
rejection of the Morlev-Minto reforms. They saw that merely to
accept institutions provided by the British and work them as the
British instructed, would do nothing to advance India’s self-
reliance. This was just a new form of the old dependence. To
prove their independence, to themselves as much as to the
British, Indians had to reject what was proffered. They had to

7Swami Vivekananda, Complete Works, (Almora 1946-7), vol. Ill,

p 224.
122 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

have the courage to cut their leading-strings.8

The question was, what then? In the Morley-Minto period
some individuals in Bengal had avoided this problem by turning
away from politics—to religion like Aurobindo Ghose or back
to literature like Rabindranath Tagore—and for the Extremist
party as a whole no satisfactory answer had been found. The
years between 1909 and 1916, the years of negative opposition,
had been full of frustration. Again in 1920 they had the chance
to reject a British constitution and again they had to ask, what
then? This time more depended upon their answer for now they
had political power, with all its opportunities and responsibilities.
In 1909 they had been outside the Congress but in 1920 they had
control of the organisation and commanded a large following.
If they did not participate in the new councils, they had to
formulate a satisfactory programme of political action of their
own.
It was a measure of their uncertainty when faced with this
difficult decision, that they vacillated for a year before finally
rejecting the Montagu-Chelmsford constitution. The December
1919 Congress at Amritsar resolved to work the reforms, but
this decision was reversed by a narrow majority at a special
session in Calcutta nine months later, and the plenary meeting
at Nagpur in December 1920 voted overwhelmingly for with¬
drawal of all co-operation with the British.
Between Amritsar and Calcutta, Calcutta and Nagpur, there
were some remarkable changes of mind, none more striking than
those of the Bengalis. At Amritsar the Bengal contingent, led
by Chittaranjan Das, Byomkes Chakravarti and Bepin Chandra
Pal, voted against the reforms. At Calcutta they voted for them.
At Nagpur they were all for non-cooperation. To understand
why they wavered, it is necessary to understand their attitude to
the person and policy of M.K. Gandhi. It was Gandhi who com¬
manded the majorities at Amritsar and Calcutta, where the
Bengal nationalists voted with the minority, and it was to
Gandhi that they capitulated at Nagpur.

“B C. Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj; the Rise of New Patriotism,

(Calcutta, 1954), pp. 4 and 188. Aurobindo Ghose, Speeches, (Calcutta,
2nd edn 1948), pp. 83-4, 88-9, 148 and 151-2. Rabindranath Tagore,
Towards Universal Man, (London, 1961), pp. 49-66, and 101-28.
 THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 123

II

Gandhi, a Gujerati lawyer who had won a great reputation in

South Africa with his work for Indian rights, had emerged in
the first rank of nationalist leaders after a spectacular success
in leading a protest movement against the indigo planters of
Bihar in 1918. It was at his instigation that the‘hartals’of
April 1919 in protest against the Rowlatt Acts had been organis¬
ed. The nationwide response to his appeal was testimony to
his extraordinary influence, but the violence which resulted,
shocked him deeply. He was convinced that without greater
self-discipline India could not challenge the British, and for this
reason he demanded that the Congress accept the Montagu-
Chelmsford constitution. To those, like the Bengalis, who
argued that the 1919 Congress session at Amritsar should
reiterate the earlier uncompromising resolutions on the reforms,
he replied that this would be irresponsible if the Congress had
nothing constructive to offer in their place.9
Two incidents in January 1920 forced him to think again:
the hero’s welcome accorded on his arrival in Britain to
General Reginald Dyer, the officer responsible for the Amritsar
tragedy, and the rejection by the British Government of Indian
Muslim protests over the Turkish peace terms. Gandhi was
convinced that after these demonstrations of British disregard
for their feelings it would be degrading for Indians to maintain
their contact with British imperialism.10 He therefore set out to
formulate a programme of non-cooperation which Congress
could offer to the nation in place of the reforms.
First, support for the institutions of British Indian Govern¬
ment—offices, councils, courts, colleges aud schools—should be
withdrawn and Congressmen should devote themselves to the
construction of national institutions in their place: ‘a govern¬
ment of one’s own within the dead shell of the foreign govern¬
ment’.11 Resistance, non-violent and symbolic, might be offered
to individual acts of British oppression, but the really important

9Native Papers, December 1919-January 1920.

10The development of Gandhi’s thought in this period can be
followed through his articles in Young India, 1919-1922, (Madras, 1922).
“Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 6 September [1920], Andrews
Papers.
 124 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

work was in national reconstruction.

Foi the nation as for the individual, Gandhi taught, salvation
could be gained only by internal reformation. Society had to
be rid of its evils, especially those of dissension and human
exploitation. As a first step, he called for a reconciliation be¬
tween religious communities and he took up the Khilafat issue
as a means of cementing Hindu-Muslim unity. He also
demanded that caste barriers be broken down and that the un¬
touchables be accepted into the body of Hinduism. Congress¬
men of all castes should work with the Harijans (the children
of God, as Gandhi called them) to help them rise from their
degradation.
Similarly there had to be an end to economic oppression.
Gandhi was adamant that self-government for India would be
a travesty if the mass of the people were not freed from the
exploitation of capitalists, landholders and money-lenders. The
nationalist movement had to be the people’s movement, to
benefit the mass of the people. ‘I don’t want Swaraj at the cost
of the depressed classes or of any other classes for that matter,’
he wrote.12 He therefore insisted that Congress demonstrate its
concern for the welfare of the Indian poor by adopting a pro¬
gramme of economic rehabilitation. Congressmen should leave
their urban professions and go into the villages to start cottage
industries. The local manufacture of cotton cloth should be
revived. The spinning wheel should become the symbol of
India’s new life and the wearing of khadi a gesture of the
nation's rejection of imperialism.
Apart from having a rare ability to sway great masses of
people, Gandhi was an astute politician, and thoughout the first
half of 1920 he was gathering around him an influential group
of personal adherents on whose support he could rely when he
put his programme of non-cooperation before Congress.13
Despite this there remained powerful sections who were
opposed to the adoption of the scheme and who were determin¬
ed not to acquiesce in his domination of the nationalist

^Gandhi to Andrews, 23 November 1920, quoted in B. Chaturvedi

and M. Sykes, Charles Freer Andrews. A Narrative, (London, 1949),
pp. 156-7.
13J. Nehru, Toward Fieedom. The Autobiography, (New York, 1941),
pp. 51-3.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 125

movement. Foremost amongst these were the Bengali leaders.

An obvious reason for their opposition, and the one most
often cited, was that they saw Gandhi as a rival. Chittaranjan
Das certainly aspired to national leadership and his frequent
appearances on public platforms outside Bengal in the preced¬
ing two years had already won him a national reputation.14
Byomkes Chakravarti and Bepin Chandra Pal may have had
similar ambitions.
Personal rivalry aside, there was reason for the Bengal nation¬
alist leaders to be apprehensive, for Gandhi made it clear that
there would be no room for dissenters in any political organisa¬
tion which he commanded. ‘ ... so long as you choose to
keep me as your leader,’ he told a meeting of Muslims early
in 1920, ‘you must accept my conditions, you must accept
dictatorship and the discipline of martial law.'15 This was some¬
thing new to Indian nationalism. Formerly the great Congress
leaders—Naoroji, Mehta, Banerjea, Lajpat Rai, Gokhale, Tilak,
Besant—had derived their power from one province and they
had worked in alliance with leaders from other provinces on
the understanding that there would be a minimum of mutual
interference in regional activities. Gandhi relied far less on the
support of any one area and his ambition was to subordinate
regional differences to his national plan.
This the Bengal leaders were not in the least inclined to
accept. Bengalis had enjoyed power in the nationalist move¬
ment for too long to be willing simply to abdicate on request.
Nor were they willing to have an outsider dictate the form and
content of their provincial politics. To Gandhi’s insistent
demands for a strong central authority under his control, they
replied that personal dictatorship in the nationalist movement
and a rigidly uniform policy would stunt national development..
•Blind reverence for Gandhiji’s leadeiship,’ wrote Bepin
Chandra Pal, ‘would kill people’s freedom of thought and would
paralyse by the deadweight of unreasoning reverence their
individual conscience.’16

14H.F. Owen, ‘The Leadership of the Indian National Movement,.

1914-20’, unpublished doctoral thesis. Australian National University,
1965, particularly Chapter VI.
15Nehru, Toward Freedom, p. 53.
16Pal to Motilal Nehru, n.d., quoted in Alulchandra Gupta ed.„
 126 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Personal ambition and a determination to maintai 1 influence

in the nationalist movement—these factors take us some distance
towards an explanation of the opposition of the Bengal Congress
leaders, but to go further we must understand the position which
these men occupied in Bengal society, for in the last lesort it was
this that determined their attitude towards Gandhi's proposals.
This social analysis will necessitate a short digression from our
main theme, but throughout we shall highlight those elements
which help to explain the dilemma facing the Bengal Congress
in 1920.

Ill

The first and cardinal point is that almost all nationalist

politicians in Bengal at that time, Extremist or Moderate, were
bhadralok: ‘respectable people’. The bhadrolok were not a
social class, economically or occupationally defined; they were
a status group,1, distinguished from other Bengali communities
by their style of life and their sense of social propriety. Hence
the significance of the teim ‘respectable people’.

Studies in the Bengal Renaissance. In Commemoration of the Birth of

Bipinchandra Pal, (Calcutta, 1958), p. 577.
17I am using Max Weber’s definition of status group: “What is a
“status group”? “Classes” are groups of people who, from the stand¬
point of specific interests, have the same economic position. Ownership
or non-ownership of material goods or of definite skills cons’itute the
“class-situation”. “Status” is a quality of social honor or a lack of it,
and is in the main conditioned as well as expressed through a specific
style of life. Social honor can stick directly to a class-situation, and it is
also, indeed most of the time, determined by the average class-situation
of the status-group members. This, however, is not necessarily the case.
Status membership, in turn, influences the class-situation in that the
style of life required by status groups makes them prefer special kinds
of property or gainful pursuits and reject others. A status group can be
closed (“status by descent”) or it can be open.
‘It is incoirect to think of the “occupational status group” as an
alternative. The “style of life”, not the “occupation”, is always deci¬
sive. This style may require a certain profession (for instance, military
service), but the nature of the occupational service resulting from the
claims of a style of life always remains decisive (for instance, military
service as a knight rather than as a mercenary).’ H.H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills eds.. From Max Weber: Essay in Sociology, (New York,
1958), p. 405.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 127

The overwhelming majority of the bhadralok came from the

three upper castes of Bengal Hindu society, Brahmin, Baidya
and Kayastha, which in all numbered no more than 2,750,000
in a total provincial population of 46,500,000 (Hindus
20,250.000, Muslims 25,250,000).18 From the proscriptions of
these three castes, the bhadralok derived their basic social
values, most significantly their aversion to manual labour and
their belief in the inferiority of manual occupations. For many
centuries there appears to have been an unusually wide gap
between the high and low castes in Bengal, for there were few
of the respectable intermediate castes which existed in other
areas to act as a bridge. Unlike the high castes of some parts of
India, those of Bengal did not till the soil. If they were engaged
in agriculture they employed others to work their fields, for
manual labour was considered degrading. The result was
observed by an I.C.S. officer. J.C. Jack, in an economic survey
of Faridpur district published in 1916:

Amongst the Hindus . . . landowners, clerks, professional

men such as doctors, lawyers and priests, form a class apart.
They are of the three higher castes in the Hindu caste system
and have for centuries lived in a different manner from the
ordinary population. They have more wants and more ways
of spending their money; they eat less but better food with
greater variety; their houses are built on a different plan
and are better furnished; their clothes although the same in
cut display more variety in quality and colour.19

Reinforcing the bhadralok’s distinctiveness and sense of

superiority to the ‘labouring classes’ was their conviction that
they had a vital role to play as guardians of a great cultural
tradition. Their’s was the responsibility for the preservation of
Hinduism in Bengal. They were the bearers of learning, the
custodians of art, the interpreters of philosophy and doctrine.
As a natural consequence they set great store by education.
Here again they revealed their debt to high-caste values, but

ieCensus of India, 1921, Vol. I, Pt II, p. 3; Vol. 5, Pt I, pp. 350-6.

19J.C. Jack, The Economic Life of a Bengal District, A Study,
{London, 1916), p. 69.
 128 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

for them education was something far more than a mere tradi¬
tional caste obligation. It was to education that the group had
owed its success from the early nineteenth century onwards in
gaining the lion’s share of the new opportunities for profession¬
al, administrative and clerical employment which had accom¬
panied the expansion of British rule in north India. Education,
particularly English-language education, had been the making
of the community under the British and it had become the
hallmark of bhadralok status.
Not every individual who considered himself of the bhadra¬
lok could obtain an education. Not every bhadralok family
could afford the education it desired for all its sons. But the
ideal was accepted by all: an education, preferably in the English
language, leading to a university college in Calcutta and ‘white
collar’ employment. For the elite: the Presidency College, an
English university or the Inns of Court in London, and success
in the I.C.S. examination, at the bar of the Calcutta High Court
or in one of the other learned professions of the capital. ‘The
school,’ observed a Bengal Government report in 1928, ‘is the
one gate to the society of the bhadralok.’20
This points to another important characteristic of the group:
the fact that it was not closed. For a low-caste Hindu or for a
Muslim it was difficult to enter the charmed circle of the
respectable, but it was not impossible and education was the
way. ‘We must remember that in Bengal the social order is a
despotism of caste, tempered by matriculation,’ remarked the
1914 Bengal District Administration Committee with some
asperity.21 Education, professional or clerical employment, the
observance of bhadralok values and conformity to the proper
cultural style—these were the means to acceptance as one of the
respectable people.
Thus we can find among the bhadralok nationalist politicians
of the second decade of this century a handful of men who were
not Brahmin, Baidya or Kayastha: Muslim lawyers like Abdul
Rasul from Chittagong, Abul Kasem from Burdwan and Fazlul
Huq from Barisal; or Birendranath Sasmal, also a lawyer and

20Indian Statutory Commission, (London, 1930), Vol. VIII, p. 24.

21 Bengal District Administration Committee, 1913-1914, Reporty
(Calcutta, 1915), p. 176.
 THE NON-COOPIRATION DECISION 129

a member of the agricultural Mahisya caste from Contai. Nor

should it come as any more of a surprise to find in the Bengal
Congress of that period men such as Bijoy Prasad Singh Roy,
whose political and social style was typical of the bhadralok
elite, in spite of the fact that he was a Kshatriya of Rajput
origin and a great zamindar in Burdwan division. This points
up another feature of Bengal society important to an under¬
standing of the bhadralok: the fact that there was no clear-cut
distinction between the landed and professional classes here as
there was in many other parts of India. Many, perhaps most
bhadralok families had some investment in landed rents to
supplement, more or lass adequately, the income of their
members from professional or clerical employment. Landed
property was valued for the status which its possession confer¬
red and the bhadralok, as a group, thought of themselves as
‘landed’.
Bijoy Prasad Singh Roy, we said, was typical of the bhadra¬
lok elite in his political and social style. Let us examine his
career to see what this meant.22 In the first place he had the
‘right’ education: Chakdighi village school; Hindu school.
Calcutta; Presidency College; and the Calcutta University Law
College; M.A., LL.B. Nor did his concern with education end
with his graduation. He maintained a keen interest in college
affairs and was ultimately a Fellow of Calcutta University.
Involvement of this kind with educational administration,
whether in a rural district, a mofussil town or in Calcutta, was
characteristic of the bhadralok. Educational institutions were
rungs in the community’s ladder of preferment, and they were
to be jealously guarded and maintained with care. Moreover as
one of the few avenues of constructive public activity open to them
in their circumscribed colonial society, educational politics—
particularly the politics of Calcutta Univers'ty—had assumed an
extraordinary significance for the bhadralok.
For a similar reason election to local self-governing bodies—
local and district boards, and municipalities—was keenly sought,
and thus we find Singh Roy serving for many years on the

22For biographical details see G.D. Binani and T.V. Rama Rao eds.,
India at a Glance, (Bombay, revised edition 1954), p. 1726. Obituaries
in Amrita Bazar Patrika, Statesman, Calcutta, and The Times, London,
25 November 1961.
130 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Calcutta Corporation and Improvement Trust, and later achiev¬

ing the honour of Sheriff of the city. He had an equally distin¬
guished career in the provincial legislature. Obviously direct
participation of this kind in legislative politics was beyond the
reach of all but a handful of the bhadralok, but even so parlia¬
mentary institutions were valued by many of the group as a
potential instrument for the orderly achievement of self-govern¬
ment.
As a Calcutta High Court advocate Singh Roy was active in
another area of bhadralok concern, the law. The community’s
keen attachment to legal institutions and the process of law was
striking, and it is only partly explained by the career opportuni¬
ties offered by the legal profession. Fundamentally the law was
valued by the bhadralok—a socially privileged and consciously
superior group—as the framework of social stability and order.
We have just suggested that this concern for social order was a
reason for the bhadralok’s involvement with parliamentary
institutions, and we should also recognise it as a factor under¬
lying their ambition to furnish large numbers of recruits for the
Indian and Bengal Civil Services, and their determination to
control the institutions of education and local self-government.
In one other respect B.P. Singh Roy was representative of
the bhadralok: in his nationalism. Nationalist politics in Bengal
in the period which we are discussing, the end of the second
decade of the twentieth century, were an exclusive bhadralok
preserve, and (the other side of the coin) to be bhadralok and
not to be a nationalist was to reject one of the common values
of the group. Understandably there was wide and frequently
acrimonious disagreement over methods of political action, and
there was a variety of institutional affiliation, ranging from
the Indian Association and the Moderate Party, through the
Provincial Congress, to the revolutionary and terrorist samitis.
But these were all bhadralok organisations23 and the disagree¬
ments were disagreements between bhadralok.
No one man’s career can illustrate all aspects of a society
and we must take account of areas of bhadralok activity outside

23This is based on an analysis of the list of office-bearers of officially

recognised associations prepared annually by the Political Department
Government of Bengal; and Sedition Committee, 1919, Report,
(Calcutta, 1918).
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 131

Singh R.oy’s experience. There were other important organisa¬

tions, for instance the students associations which gave an
institutional focus to the activities of bhadralok adolescents in
their formative college years, when they were freed briefly from
the narrow constraints of the joint family. There were the
student messes in which those who went to Calcutta for an
education found accommodation and security among bhadralok
youths from their home districts.24 There were the Peoples’ and
District Associations in the mofussil and the Rate-payers’
Associations in the Calcutta suburbs, which, with the District
Bar Associations, were the watchdogs of local bhadralok inter¬
ests. There were the libraries, reading rooms and debating
societies, found in every Bengal town supported by bhadralok
money and managed by bhadralok committees, as centres for
educated gathering and discussion. Equally as important as
these formal institutions were the informal ties of tradition
which bound the urban bhadralok to their ancestral villages,
giving the group a communications network extending through¬
out Bengal; and the customary pattern of settlement in Calcutta
which divided the bhadralok and other communities into
separate paras (neighbourhoods).25
In all of these things there is indirect evidence of a distinct
bhadralok identity. For a positive expression of that identity
we can look to Bengali literature, for the literature like the
politics of Bengal was the bhadralok’s creation and cherished
possession. Under the stimulus of European contact in Calcutta,
the bhadralok in the nineteenth century had refashioned
Bengali as a rich literary language, freely borrowing forms and
techniques from English to enable them to grapple effectively
with the intellectual issues introduced to their society by the
European cultural intrusion.
Their achievement, now generally known as the Bengal
Renaissance, is sufficiently celebrated as to need no elaboration,
but we should consider its contribution to the formation of
bhadralok identity. Primarily it gave the group a common
syncretic culture which reinforced their distinctiveness from the

!iSee N.C. Chaudhuri, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian,

(London, 1951), pp. 301-4, M.K. Chakravarty, A Back Bencher's Autobio¬
graphy [Calcutta], n.d.
25Census of India, 1921, Vol. VI, Pt I, pp. 36-7.
 132 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

lower strata of Bengal society and set them apart even from
educated groups in other regions of India. Their inheritance
was a passionate attachment to the Bengali language, an
intense pride in their literature and an awakened consciousness,
of the history of Bengal. A sense of the past was accompanied
by growing sense of country, and the images of the Motherland
and of Bengal the Nation filled their literature. The great
literary figures were venerated, with the politicians, as heroes
of nationalism. Of Rabindranath Tagore, most honoured of all,
it could be said: ‘He has sung Bengal into a nation.’26
But songs alone could not make a nation, as Vivekananda so
eloquendy emphasised. Courageous action was needed to prove
Bengali manhood. ‘What we want is muscles of iron and
nerves of steel. We have wept long enough. No more weeping,
but stand on your feet and be men.’ After Vivekananda an
emphasis upon the virtues of strength and vigour as the means
of national regeneration was an article of the Hindu bhadralok
creed. Bengal once strong in the classical age, it was said, had
been emasculated by the quietest doctrines of Buddhism and the
emotional popular cults of medieval Hinduism. The ‘true
Brahmanical virtues’ of intellectual initiative and rational self-
assertion had been neglected, and the degradation of the Muslim
and British conquests was a natural consequence.27 ‘Let us think
for a moment of the fatal and universal weakness which had beset
our people when the English first came to this land,’ Chittaranjan
Das exhorted his fellow Bengal Congressmen in 1917. ‘Our
Religion of Power—the Gospel of‘“Sakti”—had become a
mockery of its former self; it had lost its soul of beneficence in
the repetition of empty formulas and the observance of meaning¬
less mummeries ... the Hindus of Bengal had lost strength and
vigour alike in Religion, Science, and Life.’28 To Das, as to his

26Ezra Pound, quoted in H.M. Hurwitz, ‘Ezra Pound and

Rabindranath Tagore’. American Literature, Vol. XXXVI, No. 1,
March 1964, p. 54.
27E.g., see J.C. Ghosh, Bengali Literature, (Lcndcn 1948), passim.
N.C. Chaudhuri, ‘Subhas Chandra Bose—His Legacy and Legend’,
Pacfic Affairs, Vol. XXVI, 1953, pp. 354-5. S.C. Bose, The Indian
Struggle, 1920-1934. (Calcutta, 1948), pp. 15 and 161-4. Rabindranath
Tagore to Andrews, 5 March 1921, R.N, Tagore, Letter to a Friend,
(London, 1928), pp. 130-1.
28 Bengal and the Bengalees’, Presidential Address, Bengal Provincial
 THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 133

fellow Hindu bhadralok, it was self-evident that it was their

ordained mission to restore the glory of Bengal through
strength in action.

IV

We are now better equipped to look again at the clash in 1920

between Gandhi and the nationalist leaders. From our discus¬
sion of the Hindu bhadralok’s ideal of political action, one area
of disagreement will be readily apparent: Gandhi’s philosophy
of non-violence. Coming from a Gujerati trading caste, Gandhi
had been strongly influenced by the quietest doctrines of
Jainism and Vaishnavism, and it was one of the secrets of his
mass appeal that he customarily used popular Vaishnava images
in his speeches. By many of the bhadralok, modern Vaishnavism
was despised as a lower-class survival of the obscurantist cults
of medieval times.29 The contrast between the ‘beggarly and
cringing’ Vaishnava and the ‘bold’ Sakta worshipper of the
principle of strength in the goddess Kali, was familiar in their
literature. Self-assertion, not self abasement as Gandhi preach¬
ed, was the doctrine of the bhadralok and their leaders refused to
accept his philosophy of politics. Bepin Chandra Pal explained:

I am not blind to the possibilities of good in the great hold

that Mahatmaji has got on the populace; but there is the
other side; and in the earlier stages of democracy these
personal influences, when they are due to the inspirations of
mediaeval religious sentiments, are simply fatal to its future.
This does not remove the inherited slave-mentality which is
the root of all our degradations and miseries.30

There was another more pragmatic reason why Gandhi’s

insistence on ‘satyagraha’ was unwelcome to the Bengal leaders.
It seemed, at least initially, to offer no prospect of a satisfactory
engagement with the British. A resort to passive resistance was

Conference, Calcutta, April 1917. Rajen Sen. Deshbandhu Chittaranjan

Das, Life and Speeches, (Calcutta, 1926), p. 11.
29See the first two references given under note 27, above; B.C. Pal,
Bengal Vaishnavism, (Calcutta, 1962), Chapters V and VI.
3°Pal to Motilal Nehru, n.d. quoted in Gupta, Studies in the Bengal
Renaissance, p. 577.
 134 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

no doubt necessary on occasions for suppressed majority

communities, but it was considered inappropriate for the
bhadralok who were a dominant minority. Their politicians
demanded a form of political action which enabled them to
exert themselves against their adversaries, the British, without
(and this qualification was important) endangering their hold on
political life. These requirements were met by legislative politics
and terrorism, both of which provided opportunities to hit at
the British and yet involved relatively few people. It was in
these activities that the bhadralok politicians were accustomed
to engage. Thus Gandhi’s insistence upon non-violence, as also
his demand for a boycott of the legislative councils, threatened
their political style.
His rationale for council boycott seemed absurd to most of
the bhadralok leaders. He was arguing that Congressmen should
withdraw from legislative councils and the other institutions of
British Indian government because those institutions were alien
and imposed. To many Bengal Congressmen such an argument
was nonsense. In the past when they had boycotted the legisla¬
tive councils it was not because the councils were foreign—
because they were based on the English parliamentary model
instead of an indigenous Indian model—but because they did
not conform ‘closely enough’ to the English model, their powers
being so severely limited. The bhadralok wanted parliamentry
self-government in Bengal, and, at least in part, terrorism was
their protest against the British refusal to recognise the intensity
of their desire or to admit their capacity for such a form of
government.
This reveals the cultural gulf dividing Gandhi from the
bhadralok. As Susanne Rudolph has demonstrated so convinc¬
ingly, Gandhi was as concerned as any Bengali with questions of
courage, and he was offering satyagraha to Indians as a way to
prove their courage while maintaining their cultural integrity.31
Yet for the bhadralok his exclusive emphasis on ahimsa and
satyagraha offended dearly cherished values, and it was their
cultural integrity which they felt to be threatened.
This threat was increased by Gandhi’s espousal of the

31S.H. Rudolph, ‘The New Courage. An Essay on Gandhi’s Psycho¬

logy’, World Politics, Vol. XVI No 1, October 1963, pp. 98-117.
 THE NON-COOPFRATION DECISION 135

doctrine of ‘creative crisis’. He proclaimed that he and his

followers would harness the enthusiasm and energy generated
by his campaign, to clear away the alien debris which overlay
Indian society. Only in this way, he claimed, could national
creativity be restored.32 On the surface there was nothing novel
for Bengal in this. Attacks on ‘Anglicisation” and appeals for a
return to the ‘strength and simplicity of true Bengal life’ had
been heard frequently from political platforms throughout the
province in the preceding fifteen years,33 but formerly the orators
were all bhadralok, often the most westernised elite politicians,
men who valued the European elements in their culture too
highly to consider acting on their own advice. Gandhi, on the
other hand, had shown in his personal life that he meant what
he said, and he was now insisting that all nationalists should
follow his example. A return to simplicity of living to free the
individual from the tyranny of material possessions; the renun¬
ciation of all non-essentials; a total commitment to the struggle
against foreign domination—these were Gandhi’s demands.
To the bhadralok leadership34 this was philistinism. They were
passionately proud of the richness of their culture and were
unconvinced that they should strip their life bare in this way.
Charles Freer Andrews, who had gained from his work with
Rabindranath Tagore at Santiniketan a deep sympathy for
bhadralok values, described their reaction. Writing to Tagcre
in January 1921 of the joys of painting, he remarked:

Here are things which Mahatma Gandhi finds it difficult

to understand, and he would suspend them all, while we get
Swaraj—but not I, not I! I could never give up these! . . .No,
there is some fundmeantal difference there: and perhaps it
runs through the whole of Bengal as compared with Gujerat.

32E.g. see Young India, 1919-22, pp. 349-53, 373-83, 601, 608-13 and
668-75.
33E.g. see C.R. Das, ‘Bengal and the Bengalees’, Sen, Deshbandhu
Chittaranjan Das. Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj, pp. 188 and 198-9. Motilal
Ghose to G.K. Gokhale, 19 October 1906, Gokhale Papeis, Servants of
India Society, Poona. Cf. Nayak, 3 December 1912
34It is important that the reader should note the distinction which I
draw between the attitudes of bhadralok leaders or politicians, and the
bhadralok community as a whole; and, in the latter part of the paper,
between bhadralok elite and lower-class bhadralok.
136 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Here, in Bengal, Mahatmaji is saying ‘Let every student take

up spinning and weaving, and drop everything else’. But the
Bengali students say ‘We will take up spinning and weaving,
but we shall not drop everything else.’—There again, is the
difference!35

Tagore himself spoke from the heart of the bhadralok when

he demanded rhetorically of Gandhi: ‘The mind, surely, is not of
less account than a length of cotton thread spun on the wheel!'36
In a series of public addresses in Calcutta in August 1921 on
his return from an extended trip abroad, he protested against
Gandhi’s anti-intellectualism and narrowness of view. Let us
not obscure our vision of the wider world with the dust raised
by political passion, he said. Let us seek universal truth, for
‘India’s awakening is a part of the awakening of the world.’37
Earlier he had written: ‘Our present struggles to alienate our
heart and mind from the west is an attempt at spiritual suicide.
. . . Let us be rid of all false pride and rejoice at any lamp
being lit in any corner of the world, knowing that it is a part of
the common illumination of our house.’38 His attack brought
Gandhi to Calcutta but discussions between the two men revea¬
led (in the words of a contemporary) ‘a difference of tempera¬
ment so wide that it was extremely difficult to arrive at a common
intellectual understanding’.39
These differences of culture and temperament certainly stood
as barriers between Gandhi and the hhadralok nationalists, but
there were other, less unimpeachable, reasons for their reluct¬
ance to follow his lead. This had been brought home to
Andrews on a visit to Calcutta in September in 1920 when he
met a friend,Promothonath Chaudhuri,‘bitter beyond words and
crying out against his countrymen for their folly in following

3o31 January [1921], Andrews Papers. Cf. Andrews to Tagore, 26

January 1921, quoted in Chaturvedi and Sykes, Charles Freer Andrews,
p. 176; and Tagore to Andrews, 5 March 1921, Tagore, Letters to a
Friend, pp. 131-3.
3°‘The Call of Truth’, speech at a public meeting in Calcutta, 29
August 1921, Tagore, Towards Universal Man, p. 267.
31 Ibid., pp. 270-3.
J8Tagore to Andrews, 13 March 1921, Tagore, Letters to a Friend,
p. 136.
39Quoted in Tagore, Towards Universal Man, p. 377.
 THE NON-COOPERA * ION DECISION 137

any one who is an Ascetic, as though wisdom must necessarily

come from fasting and starving and hunger-striking.’

But though my intellect went with Promotho Babu and I

could never follow Mr. Gandhi in his extravagances [Andrews
recalled later] I could not help contrasting the other side:
for there was Promotho Babu . . . and others in the
Camac Street Club with every single luxury of a London
Club-life around them,—playing bridge and taking their
strong glasses of whisky and brandy. Say what one would to
justify it they were parasites-, living on immense fees taken
from others. And if one had to choose, was not their judge¬
ment,-—their moral judgement,—far more warped by luxury
and luxurious living than Mr. Gandhi’s by starvation.40

There was more than politics and poetry to the good life which
the bhadralok elite was defending.

The Bengal Congressmen's memory of the anti-partition agita¬

tion was another difficulty with which Gandhi had to contend in
his effort to win Bengal for non-cooperation. 1905 wasuppermost
in bhadralok minds as they faced the decisions of 1920. ‘I find
our countrymen are furiously excited about Non-cooperation,’
remarked Tagore in September. ‘It will grow into something
like our Swadeshi movement in Bengal.’41 ‘In Bengal we have
passed through the stage of non-cooperation,’ wrote Banerjea
a month later. ‘We practised it in the days of the swadeshi
movement and the anti-partition agitation. We were non-coope¬
rators before the rest of India thought of it.’42 As this suggests
there was a certain satisfaction in the thought that the rest of
India was now following a path which Bengal had trodden
fifteen years before, but there was also an element of pique at
the temerity of an outsider like Gandhi in bringing forward as
his own inventions and under labels of his own choosing, the

40Andrews to Tagore, 5 October [1920],

41Tagore to Andrews, 18 September 1920, Tagore, Letters to a Friend,
p. 95.
42Bengalee, 26 October 1920.
138 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

old methods of boycott, swadeshi and national education.

Nor were the bhadralok leaders at all certain that they
wished to retrace their steps. The campaigns of the partition
period had been exhilarating but in retrospect the risks that
had been taken seemed very grave. For a cause as dear to
Flindu bhadralok hearts as the unity of Bengal those risks had
been worthwhile, but were they similarly justified for ‘a politic¬
al chimera'43 such as Gandhi’s swarap. Admittedly the anti¬
partition agitation had achieved its ultimate object and in Hindu
bhadralok lore it was reckoned a great victory, but there were
many secret doubts as to the efficacy of the political methods
which had been used.44 The effects of British retaliation had
been serious. Public life in Bengal in the years following 1908
had suffered severely from the suppression of samitis, the
imprisonment and deportation of political suspects, and the
extended activities of the CID.4° Bengal had pushed out its
chin once and been punched hard. It was still suffering from
the after-effects and it was naturally reluctant to invite another
blow.
What carried even greater weight in the thinking of the
Hindu bhadralok leaders was the social repercussions of the
anti-partition agitation. In trying new methods of direct action
in 1906 and 1907 in an effort to involve more people in their
agitation against the British, the politicians had stirred up a
hornets’ nest of regional, communal, and class dissension. To
their acute embarrassment their bhadralok followers had res¬
ponded with an enthusiasm which they could not control and
their leadership had been discredited by this failure, which
alone was sufficient to make them chary of ever repeating
such an adventure. More disturbing still was the hostile
reaction which they had evoked from communities, such as the

43An expression used in a manifesto opposing non cooperation, which

was published by five leading Bengali Extremists. Servant, 29 September
1920.
44E.g. see Tagore, Towards Universal Man, pp. 258-9. P.N. Bose,
Swaraj: Cultural and Political, (Calcutta, 1920). pp. 157-9. Surendranath
Ray speaking in Bengal Legislative Council, 26 July 1915, Bengal Legis¬
lative Council Proceedings, Vol. XLVII, pp. 437-8.
15See S.N. Banerjea, A Nation in Making: being the reminiscences of
fifty years of public life, (London, 1925), p. 247.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 139

Muslims, Namasudras and Marwaris, who previously had had

no part in politics.46 For thirty years the Bengal nationalists had
maintained as their ideal the ultimate involvement of the ‘masses’
in the nationalist movement, but previously there had been
no occasion for them to seek mass, support, nor had they shown
any particular concern at the lack of such an opportunity. As
A.J.P Taylor wrote of early nineteenth-century nationalism
under the Hapsburg monarchy: ‘The masses were evoked as a
shadowy presence off-stage, reinforcements that were not ex¬
pected to appear.’47 The agitation of J905-6, however, provided
opportunities for political leadership to younger bhadralok,
some of whom were determined to abandon the ‘cautious’ poli¬
cies of their elders. They would involve the ‘masses’ in poli¬
tics.48 To their chagrin their appeals for support to pon-
bhadralok groups were hostilely rejected, and when a few
Hindu bhadralok zamindars and lawyers attempted to use their
economic and social power to coerce their inferiors, the result
was communal violence.49 This experience left a deep impres¬
sion on Hindu bhadralok political thinking. Although the
group’s leaders did not totally discard the ideal of mass parti¬
cipation in nationalism, they were convinced that an incautious
appeal for wider support might endanger the Hindu bhadtalok’s
political, and even social, dominance. This reinforced their
preference for the elitist and socially-secure forms of political
action, such as legislative politics and terrorism, to which they
were accustomed.
4GDinshaw Wacha to Dadabhai Naoroji, 3 May 1907, Wacha JtLers,
Bombay Presidency Association, Bombay. G.K. Gokhale to Sir
William Wedderburn, 24 May 1907, Gokhale Papers; Government of
India, Home Department Police Branch Proceedings, A140-3 and
B112-4, May 1906; Government of Bengal, Political Department
Proceedings, B65, File 8A-10(1), November 1917.
47A.J.P. Taylor, The Hapsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918. A History of the
Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary, (London 1948), p. 30.
48E.g. see Aurobindo Ghose, ‘The Shell and the Seed’, 17 September
1906, and The New Faith’, 1 December 1907, Bande Mataram editorials,
quoted in Haridas and Uma Mukherjee, Bande Mataram and Indian
Nationalism, 1906-8, (Calcutta, 1957), pp. 19-20 and 54-7.
49A.H.L. Fraser, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, to Sir Erie
Richards, 20 February 1907, Erie Richards Collection, MSS Eur. FI22,
No. 2 (e) (India Office Library, London). Government of India, Home
Department Police Branch Proceedings, A140-8 and B112-4, May 19 06.
140 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Seen against this background their reluctance to support

the non-cooperation movement in 1920 can be readily under¬
stood. It was bad enough that Gandhi should insist upon
their discarding ‘safe’ political methods in favour of direct
action, but it was adding insult to injury for him to emphasise
that it was the exclusive character of those old methods to
which he objected. His aim was to take politics to the masses,
and, by involving them in the nationalist movement, give them
political education. He wanted to lead a people’s movement.
All of which was anathema to most of the Hindu bhadralok
politicians, who had no taste for popular politics.
It must be recognised that apart from their aversion there
were real difficulties in the way of their leading a mass move¬
ment. The great bulk of the peasantry, who comprised 75 per
cent of Bengal’s population, were Muslims, and even with the
low-caste Hindus who made up the rest the Hindu bhadralok
had little in common. As we have already observed, the manual
labourer in Bengal was traditionally separated from his super¬
iors by a wide social gap, and this had been maintained by the
exclusive education system established under the British. The
peasantry shared nothing of the bhadralok culture and their
values were neither understood nor appreciated by the English-
speaking urban professional men who were engaged in politics.
In Bengal, as in most other parts of twentieth-century Asia
and Africa, there was a great problem of communication
between the small westernised intelligentsia of the cities, eager
to build a nation free from European imperialism, and the
rural populace, traditionalist and illiterate.
In an editorial published on the eve of the special Cong¬
ress session in Calcutta in September 1920, the Bengali declared:
‘We Bengalis are opposed to non-cooperation. For a period
of 10 years, from 1906 to 1916, we played that game. And we
are not prepared to take back what we rejected on delibera¬
tion then. Even Gandhi had admitted that to act up to this
resolution would mean rebellion and revolution, and we are
not ready to proceed to such a course.’50 The Bengali was
generally regarded as a voice of the Moderate party,51 but on

5011 September 1920.

61It was the Bengfli-language counterpart of the Bengalee,
Surendranath Banerjea’s famous English-language daily.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 141

this occasion its concern at the effects of mass agitation was

shared by a wide range of Bengal nationalists. Extremists as
well as Moderates.02 They were apprehensive that mass agita¬
tion would lead to violence, and that violence against the
foreigner might quickly change to violence against the socially
privileged. The Hindu bhadralok elite were afraid of the social
consequences of a disturbance of the established political
order.53
They were afraid because they had much to lose. This elite
held much of Bengal’s land and a significant share of its wealth.
Their domination of all levels of the education system gave
them almost exclusive access to the learned professions and
government service. They controlled the press. They played
a leading part in all forms of civic and village affairs. Politics
was their business. They gave Bengal its literature, music and
art. They were its cultural and social leaders. In city and
countryside they were indeed the ‘respectable people’. All of
this they stood to lose from any social upheaval. ‘Scratch a
Hindu and you will find him a conservative,’ remarked
Surendranath Banerjea.54 Certainly Banerjea’s Hindus, the
bhadralok elite, were, conservative, and well might they be so.
It must be recognised that their fear was largely a fear of
the unknown. They did not understand the ‘masses’ and they
felt no confidence in their ability to lead or even control them
should the existing order of political and social relationships

52E.g. compare the following extract from Navak, 9 September 1920:

‘Should Gandhi’s motion be carried, a revolution would break out in
the country and there would be hostility between the rulers and the
ruled. It is said that this will be a non-violent and bloodless war.
Nevertheless, we must confess that this bloodless and non-violent revo¬
lution will surely terminate in bloodshed. Indeed, non-cooperation is
another name for rebellion. So we are determined to protest against it
at all costs. Let us tell Gandhi that the goal is yet far off!’
53In his letters in this period C.F. Andrews frequently contrasted
the eagerness of the peasantry to join in mass agitation, with the reluct¬
ance of the bhadralok. See Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 6
September [1920]; Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 5 October [1920],
and 15 October [1920]; Andrews to W.W. Pearson, 12 November [1920],.
Andrews Papers.
54Banerjea, A Nation in Making, p. 397.
 142 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

be shaken. Their fear was blind but it was not unreasonable.

A leap into the political unknown could well be a leap into
revolution and anarchy. In a society like that of India of the
early twentieth century, in which there was no system of
communication extending vertically through the community;
in which there were few universally accepted social values; in
which there was no general knowledge of the functions of the
state; in which there were great economic inequalities; and in
which there were huge new urban centres where traditional
restraints had been weakened by the rapid influx of a hetero¬
geneous migrant labour force, the line between order and dis¬
order was thin. It was a perilous undertaking to rock the
ship of state, even if it was officered by unwanted foreigners.
The events of the years immediately preceding 1920 had
given the Hindu bhadralok politicians little reason for confid¬
ence. The war of 1914-18 had had a profoundly unsettling
effect on Bengali society and this social unrest was aggravated
in the immediate post-war years by economic difficulties. A
succession of natural disasters in 1918 and 1919, including the
great influenza epidemic, led to an extraordinarily sharp
rise in the prices of foodstuffs and cotton goods,55 and early
in 1920 a severe slump brought to an end a five-year boom in
Calcutta trade and industry.56 Already there had been serious
labour trouble in Bombay;57 there were disturbing rumours of
peasant unrest in the United Provinces and Bihar;58 and strikes
among the migrant industrial workers of Howrah and Hooghly-
side were becoming distressingly frequent.59
Events in Russia in 1917 had left the bhadralok elite extre¬
mely sensitive to any potential threat to property from labour.
Indeed their reaction to the Russian revolution had laid bare
their basic social conservatism. They had welcomed the success
in March of Kerensky and his Provisional Government in
deposing the Czar, as an exemplar for India’s political

65Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings, 3 February 1920, Vol. LII,

p. 104; and 10 February 1921, Vol. I, Pt II, p. 195.
60Census of India, 1921, Vol. V, Pt I, p. 34.
b7Bangali, 29 January 1919.
bSNative Papers, 1920, passim.
b* Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings, 23 November 1921, Vol. V,
pp. 182-3.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 143

emancipation,60 but their delight had turned to dismay with the

violent attack on the propertied classes which followed the
Bolshevik revolution in November. They were afraid that a
similar disaster might befall India.61
The Calcutta Muslim riots of September 1918 had shown
how much inflammable social material was now available in
Bengal for political incendiaries, and the concern of the bhad-
ralok elite at this development had been manifest in the
support accorded by the Hindu newspapers to the Government
in its use of force to suppress the disorders.62 This incident
had also underlined the fact—a distressing fact for the Hindu
bhadralok—that in Bengal it was Muslim rather than Hindu
politicians who could best make use of a mass appeal.
Although the Muslim leaders had to overcome the same pro¬
blems of class distinction, and, to a lesser degree, differences
of culture, sect and caste, they could speak directly to their co¬
religionists, in a way the Hindu bhadralok politicians could
never do, in the name of Islam. There was a fraternity amongst
Muslims such as was unknown to Hindus in Bengal. The best
ground for an appeal was of course religious—Islam in danger
—(again cool comfort to the Hindus) and in the post-war years
the perfect issue was to hand in the Khilafat movement.
Late in 1919 Khilafat committees had been established in
various parts of Bengal ‘to circulate news on the Moslem
world',63 and the official peace celebrations in December had
provided then organisers with an opportunity to incite com¬
munal feeling against the British. ‘So far as we are associated
with the “Victory”, it means defeat for Moslems,’ declaimed
the Bengali-language daily Mohammadi angrily. ‘The bier of
Moslem nationality is being carried out—are we to rejoice
thereat?’64 With the return to Calcutta in January 1920 of
Abul Kalam Azad, a young Urdu-speaking Muslim journalist
who had been interned for four years at Ranchi, the movement
took a radical turn. Azad and his followers went among the

60E.g. see Modern Review, April 1917; Dainik Bharat Mitra, 25 April
1917.
*lNative Papers, 1918, passim.
62Native Papers, 21 September 1918.
63 Mohammadi, 1 November 1919.
uIbid., 5 December 1919.
 144 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Muslim workers in the mill towns of West Bengal spreading

propaganda about the British attitude to the Khilafat. When
moderate appeals failed to stir up general anger, resort was
had to provocative rumours. It was whispered that the-
Government had ordered prayers to be said on Sunday instead.
of Friday, and had prescribed the Koran.65
The dangerous possibilities of such an exploitation of reli¬
gious fanaticism and ignorance were evident to the Hindu
bhadralok leaders, and when Gandhi urged them to support
the Khilafat movement in order to cement Hindu-Muslim unity,,
they angrily protested against his encouragement of such a
campaign. Andrews reflected their mood when he wrote: ‘The
truth is that the “Khilafat” appeals to the very worst side of
Islam—that religious arrogance, which is every whit as bad
as racial arrogance.’66 The Bengal Congressmen found it
objectionable that Gandhi should insist upon coupling a com¬
munal issue of this kind with non-cooperation and accord to-
men like Azad a place of prominence in his movement. It
strengthened their conviction that his campaign was fraught
with danger.

VI

All that has been said about the attitudes of the bhadralok
politicians towards the masses points a lesson of general appli¬
cation: that nationalist radicalism is not to be equated with
social radicalism. It would seem a statement of the obvious to
observe that the desire of colonial nationalists to rid their
country of imperial domination is not, of necessity, accompani¬
ed by a desire to reconstruct the social order; yet the failure to
grasp this point, or at best to state it explicitly, has been a

er'Indn Statutory Commission, Vol. VIH, pp. 98-9. Lawrence*

Marquess of Zetland, Essayez, (London, 1956), p. 138.
66Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 9 August [1920], Andrews
Papers. Cf. B.C. Pal to Motilal Nehru, n.d., quoted in Gupta: Studies
in the Bengal Renaissance, pp. 576-7.
67E.g. Bose, The Indian Struggle, pp. 39-40, 46 and 55. Reports on
the Working of the Reformed Constitution, 1927, (Calcutta, 1928), p. 173^
Nripendra Chandra Banerji, At the Cross-Roads, 1885-1946. The
Autobiography, (Calcutta, 1950), p. 210.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 145

frequent source of misunderstanding of the different forms

which nationalism may take in colonial countries.
The confusion which prevails over the reasons for the Bengali
reaction to Gandhi’s non-cooperation proposals provides a
striking illustration of this. Following the lead given by various
participants.6' commentators have applied the term ‘Right Wing’
to the Moderates and others who favoured council entry, and
‘Left Wing’ to the Extremists and terrorists.68 By the logic of
their metaphor they are then convinced that Gandhi’s non¬
violent non-coopeiation movement must have been of the
‘Centre’, and it is to their astonishment that they discover that
while the Bengal nationalists favoured both council entry and
terrorism (the ‘Right’ and the ‘Left’), they were most reluctant
to accept non-cooperation (the ‘Centre’).
It is evident that these writers have been led astray in their
interpretation by their failure to distinguish between nationalist
and social radicalism. The terms ‘Right and Left Wing’ which
they employ have socio-economic connotations acquired from
their European usage. If these terms are to have any meaning
in this context (and their value is doubtful) both council entry
and terrorism must be regarded as ‘Right Wing’, for they were
esteemed by the bhadralok politicians as elite activities and
non-cooperation as ‘Left Wing’, for it was regarded as socially
hazardous.
Gandhi himself was aware of the importance of this distinc¬
tion between nationalist and social radicalism. ‘Infighting the
Government the motives of co-workers can be mixed,’ he
explained. ‘In fighting the devil of untouchability I have
absolutely select company.’69 Here in a nutshell is the explana¬
tion of the Bengal Congressmen’s reaction which we have been
seeking. Gandhi was not simply offering a fight against the
Government. He was also calling for an attack on the devils in

68E.g. see V.A. Smith et at., The Oxford History of India, (London,
3rd edn. 1958), pp. 783 and 790. J. Coatman, India. The Road to Self-
Government, (London, 1941), pp. 39, 82, 84, 97 and 101. R.C. Majumdar,
H.C. Raychaudhuri and K.K. Datta, An Advanced History of India,
(London, 1946), p. 955. R.C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Move¬
ment in India, (Calcutta, 1963), Vol. II, p. 161.
69Gandhi to Andrews, 23 November [1920], quoted in Chaturvcdi
and Sykes: Charles Freer Andrews, p. 157.
146 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Indian society, and the socially conservative Hindu bhadralok

politicians were convinced that these devils should be left well
alone lest all hell be let loose.

VII

The trend of our argument has presented us with a logical

problem: if, as we have asserted, the Bengal Congressmen were
so implacably opposed to Gandhi and his programme of non¬
cooperation, why did they capitulate to him at Nagpur in
December 1920? The answer basically is that he had undercut
them by capturing the support of a section of their own
community.
At the outset of our discussion of the bhadralok, we noted
that they were a status group, not a class. We must now take
account of the fact that there were class divisions within the
status group, and that there was growing friction between the
classes. In his definition of status group. Max Weber notes
that social honour is usually determined by ‘the average class-
situation of the status-group members’, it appears that by the
second decade of this century there were a large number of
bhadralok who were discontended with their class-situation,
believing it to be far below what was proper to their status. It
is also apparent that this was the source of considerable tension
within the group as a whole.
Between about 1880 and 1910 sections of the bhadralok
appear to have been faced with serious economic difficulties. A
marked rise in population in that period had been accompanied
by increasingly frequent subinfeudation of landed rent holdings
as a result of which the return from w'hat had formerly been a
major source of bhadralok income had been reduced to negli¬
gible proportions in many cases.70 At the same time there was
growing pressure on that limited area of ‘white-collar’ employ¬
ment which the bhadralok considered respectable. Population
growth was one reason for this and another was competition
from Muslims and low-caste Hindus, who were now acquiring

70Census of India, 1921, Vol. V, Pt I, p. 385. Bengal District Admini¬

stration Committee, 1913-1914, Report, p. 13, Jack, The Economic Life
of a Bengal District, pp. 89-95. B.B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes.
Their Growth in Modern Times, (London, 1961), pp. 276-7.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 147

English-language education in small but significant numbers.

Difficulties at home were compounded with difficulties Tip-
country’. Throughout the cities and towns of north India, which
up until the 1880s or 1890s had provided employment oppor¬
tunities for enterprising Bengal bhadralok, new indigenous
educated groups were appearing to contest the available jobs
and to demand of the local Governments the exclusion of out¬
siders.'1 By 1900 office doors were shut to many younger
bhadralok. So too were the doors to the best colleges, and the
inferior institutions to which they were forced to turn were
unsatisfactory substitutes. To all of these difficulties was added
an unprecedented inflation in the basic cost of living in 1906
and 1907, accompanied by a shortage of credit, on which the
bhadralok noimally relied to finance their education and their
prestigious religious ceremonies.72
Economic deprivation, frustrated ambition and injured pride
made the lower-class bhadralok attentive listeners to the tales
then current of the enormity of the drain of wealth from India
to Britain. The same factors made them jealous of their fellow
bhadralok who had obtained the education and jobs they
desired. The vernacular press, which drew most of its readers
from among the semi-educated, underemployed lower-class
bhadralok, played upon this bitterness, ridiculing the elite for
their English affectations of speech, dress and manners, accus¬
ing them of allying with the British bureaucracy to their own
advantage, and of selfishly excluding the mass of their fellow
bhadralok from participation in politics.73
That there was real discontent over this last issue was demon¬
strated in 1905 and 1906 by young Extremists like Aurobindo
Ghose and Bepin Chandra Pal, when they won the acclaim and
support of the lower-class bhadralok by attacking the Moderates

11Census of India 1911, Vol. V, Pt [, pp. 66 and 553-4. Bengal

District Administration Committee, 1913-1914, Report, pp. 13-14, 19 and
176.
72Prices and Wages in fndia, Calcutta, 24th issue 1907, p. 17; and
ibid., 25th issue 1908, p. 12. (For this reference I am indebted to Gerald
C. Barrier, Univer-ity of Missouri.) Census of India, 1911, Vol. V, Pt I,
pp. 64-6. Jack: The Economic Life of a Bengal District, pp. 98 and
03-4.
73Native Papers, 1903-8, passim.
 148 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

for their elitist politics and by calling for popular participation

in the anti-partition agitation.74 They brought the lower-class
bhadralok onto the streets and fundamentally altered the
character of the agitation but as we have seen they did not have
the experience or techniques to control large numbers of
followers, nor was it in their power to provide them with any
permanent political role. With the withdrawal of the Extremists
from the Congress and the collapse of the anti-partition agita¬
tion under British repression in 1908, the lower-class bhadralok
were again condemned to the political wilderness.
It was eight years before there was another direct appeal to
them and again it came from the Extremists. Attempting in
1916 and 1917 to reassert themselves in the Congress and to
wrest cortrol of the provincial political organisations from the
Moderates, the Bengal Extremists raised the old cry of exclusi-
vist politic^. The way was prepared for them by the vernacular
press which had maintained in the interim a constant attack
on the Moderates on this ground. These papers had developed
stereotyped lines of criticism, with a terminology which is
highly misleading if taken out of context. When, for instance,
they spoke of the ‘babes’ they referred to those objects of
righteous scorn, the bhadralok elite. ‘The people’ or ‘the mass’
were their approving readers, the lower-class bhadralok. Their
criticism was usually levelled at the ‘babus’ selfish disregard
for‘the people’, their ‘Anglicisation’ and divorce from ‘ttue
Bengali Hindu society’, and theip concern with British institu¬
tion, titles and honours. Two passages will serve as an illus¬
tration:

Dainik Chandrika, 30 December 1914

This is the Congress of the Babus. These irreligious, luxury
loving beggars are the creation of the English education.
The country and society have nothing to do with them. The
mass do not know them, neither do they care for the mass.
By virtue of their begging through the Congress they secure
high posts, start subsidised papers and try to win fame and
respect in the country.

‘4Government of India, Home Department Public Branch Proceed¬

ings, A124C, July 1906; Native Papers. 1906-7, passim. Also see
references given under note 48, above.
 THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 149

Basumati, 17 April 1915

. . . whatever our Babus do, they do for the furtherance of
their own self-interest and not for the benefit of the people
at large. The Congress and conferences and what not keep
these agitators perpetually before the public eye and bring
them something for their pockets also. And that is all that
our ‘patriots’ care for.

It is against this background that we can understand the

applause with which Chitta Ranjan Das’ maiden political
speech—his presidential address to the Bengal Provincial Con¬
ference in April 1917—was greeted by the old Extremists poli¬
ticians and the vernacular press. Whether or not it was his
intention (and there is reason to doubt that he meant his words
to be interpreted so narrowly75) his speech was seen as an
attack on ‘babu’ politics and as a direct appeal to the lower-
class bhadralok against the Moderates.76 If we compare his
language with that current in the vernacular press, we can
appreciate why this construction was put upon his words.

We have many dangers and difficulties in the path; but

our chiefest danger is this that we have become largely and
unnecessarily Anglicised in our education, culture and social
practices. The mere mention of ‘politics’ conjures up before
our eyes the vision of English political institutions; and we
feel tempted to fall down before and worship the precise

,5Das alone among the prominent Hindu bhadralok politicians in the

1914 to 1920 period appears to. have been deeply concerned with the
absence of mass backing for the nationalist movement. At the Bengal
Provincial Conference at Mymensingh in April 1919, for instance, he
could find no support for a resolution to implement sityagraha in
Bengal, and in disgust he threatened ‘to leave the Conference and go to
the masses.’ (Government of India, Home Department Political Branch,
Proceedings, B494-7, May 1919. For this reference I am indebted to
Hugh Owen, University of Western Australia.) Tt is significant that he
did not exile himself and was therefore available in the following year
as a spokesman of the bhadralok’s opposition to Gandhi. His attitude
in 1919, however, does suggest an ambivalence towards non-cooperation
and this no doubt eased the difficulty of his decision at Nagpur in
December 1920.
'elVative Papers, April-May 1917.
150 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

form which politics has assumed under the peculiar condi¬

tions of English history. . . . Only we neglect the one thing
essential. We never look to our country, never think of
Bengal or the Bengalees, of our past national history, or our
present material condition. Hence our political agitation is
unreal and unsubstantial—divorced from all intimate touch
with the soul of our people .... We boast of being educated:
but how many are we? What room do we occupy in the
country? What is our relation to the vast masses of our
countrymen? Do they think our thoughts or speak our speech?
I am bound to confess that our countrymen have little faith
in us. And what is the reason of this unfaith? Down in the
depths of our soul, we, the educated people, have become
Anglicised: we read in English, think in English and even
our speech is translated from English. Our borrowed anglic-
ism repels our unsophisticated countrymen: they prefer the
genuine article to the shoddy imitation.77

This speech established for Das an immediate claim to

inclusion in the first rank of Bengal politicians, and it was the
keynote for a vigorous and successful Extremist effort to
mobilise lower-class bhadralok support. In the battles of late
1917 and 1918 between the Moderates and Extremists for com¬
mand of the local Congress machinery, the latter’s ability on
almost every occasion to produce a numerous and noisy back¬
ing to outvote and outshout their rivals was to prove the decisive
factor.78
There was danger, however, in what the Extremists were
doing. The nature of their appeal to the lower-class bhadralok,
especially the terms they were using gave them a false appear¬
ance of social radicalism which might expose them to a charge
of hypocrisy should there arise a demand for radical action. In
fact the Extremist politicians were as much a part of‘Babudom’
(as the influential Bengali daily Nayak described elite society79)

77C.R. Das, About Bengal, (Calcutta, 1917), pp. 4-5.

78Native Papers, September-December 1917 and July 1918. P.N. Dutt,
Memoirs of Mot Hal Ghose, (Calcutta, 1935), pp. 262-3. Indian Associa¬
tion, Calcutta, Committee and General Meeting Proceedings, January
and July 1918.
798 August 1916.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 151

as were the Moderates and should there be an attack on that

society they were almost bound to turn in its defence—which
is what happened when Gandhi appeared on the scene. Here
was a man who spoke of ‘the mass’ and ‘the people’ without
any mental reservations, who attacked Anglicisation root and
branch, and who would sever all ties with British institutions.
He offended the Hindu bhadralok politicians. Extremist as well
as Moderate, and they turned against him, but in doing so they
lost the support of their own lower-class who saw in this yet
another example of‘babu’ betrayal. Nayak spoke for them:

The Babus openly advocate democracy to obtain cheap

notoriety, while they secretly associate with Government,
with a view to securing titles and high posts carrying fat
salaries. When their object is accomplished they identify
themselves with Government. This is the reason why one
who is an Extremist today becomes a Moderate tomorrow.
Mr. Gandhi's non-cooperation movement strikes at the root
of this turncoat policy, and this is why the Babus are opposed
to it.80

With their excitement running high at their new share in

politics, the lower-class bhadralok were in no mood to tolerate
diffidence. If the ‘babus’ lacked the courage to lead them
against the British, then they would find leaders who did not.
At first they were doubtful that Gandhi was the man for the
task, for the one thing that was clear among his otherwise per¬
plexing political utterances was his unwavering opposition to
any violent conflict with the British. However by the middle
of 1920 as he clarified his ideas and they were given better
publicity in Bengal, the lower-class bhadralok grasped the fact
that he was offering a fundamental challenge to British autho¬
rity and that his agitation would provide unprecedented oppor¬
tunities for political involvement. Enthusiastically they declared
for non-cooperation, and the cautions from the elite politicians
about the dangers to Hindu bhadralok dominance of mass
politics went unheeded. ‘No one is listening,’ wrote Andrews:
‘all is clamour and noise and strife.’81

8024 December 1920.

81Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 3 August 1920.
 152 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

VII

The Bengal Congressmen were now faced with a painful

choice. Should they stand by their principles at the risk of
committing political suicide and possibly being displaced by
radical and irresponsible men? Or should they give way before
Gandhi’s popularity in the hope that ultimately they might be
able to exercise some restraint on the agitation in Bengal?
Fazlul Huq, presiding at the 1920 Provincial Conference in
April, had given a pertinent word of advice: ‘Leaders of the
people must always have the courage to face the people and if
they find that they can no longer lead, they must either give up
their politics or be prepared to be led.’82 As the year passed
and Gandhi’s following grew, many of the Bengal politicians
decided that they would have to consent to be led. ‘The whole
country is with Mr. Gandhi, but the politicians are holding
back. Yet one by one they are obliged to declare themselves,’
reported Andrews early in September.83
By that stage Gandhi, a master of political tactics, had
manoeuvred his opponents into a corner. In April and May
he had arranged for the Central Khilafat Committee and the
All-India Congress Committee to discuss non-cooperation, and
it was announced that a special session of Congress would be
held in September to decide for or against his scheme. In the
meantime he went ahead with his own preparations and on
1 August began personal non-cooperation.84 This forced the
provincial Congress committees to reach some decison, and,
with the knowledge that overt opposition to Gandhi would
bring down upon them public wrath, they could do no more
than search for some form of compromise. The Bengal com¬
mittee decided for non-cooperation in principle but urged that
the legislative councils should be boycotted from within.80 All
the leading Bengal Extremists were candidates for the first

823 April 1920 at Midnapore. (Typescript collection of Fazlul Huq’s

speeches compiled by Azizul Huq, Dacca.)
83Andrews to Rabindranath Tagore, 6 September [19201, Andrews
Papers.
84J.S. Sharma, Indian National Congress. A descriptive bibliography
of struggle for freedom, (Delhi, 1959), p. 469-70.
85Native Papers, August 1920.
 THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 153

elections for the new legislatures to be held at the end of the

year, but the uncertainty as to the policy which Congress would
adopt was a handicap to them in their canvassing. Worse still
their advocacy of council entry, even if the purpose were to
obstruct from within, put them perilously close to the Moderates
—and that was to court political disaster.
They went to the September Congress in this awkward,
compromised situation, while Gandhi, well aware of his stren¬
gth, went full of confidence. The main debate on non-coopera¬
tion took place in the Subjects Committee. For three days the
Bengalis struggled vainly to swing the majority against Gandhi,
who was obdurate in his insistence that Congress give imme¬
diate support to every irem of his programme. When his reso¬
lution came before the full session on the 8th, Bepin Chandra
Pal moved an amendment to accept the principle but delay the
implementation of non-cooperation. His concern, he explained,
was to avoid a failure on a national scale such as had occurred
in Bengal during the ‘swadeshi’ campaign of the partition
period. In the voting on the following day, Pal’s amendment was
rejected and Gandhi’s resolution carried by a large majority,
against the votes of all but a handful of the Bengal delegates.86
What were Gandhi’s opponents to do now? Should they with¬
draw from the Congress and go ahead with their preparations for
the elections? Should they remain in the Congress in the hope that
they could reverse the decision at the annual session in December?
Or should they forget their qualms and accept non-cooperation?
They were in a quandary, but they could not hesitate for long
for they were under pressure from the Gandhians to declare
themselves.87 After a week of agonised debate, the main group
in the Bengal Congress, under the leadership of C.R. Das and
Byomkes Chakravarti, decided to adopt the second course: they
would bow to the majority decision for the present but would
work for its reversal at the end of the year. This meant, how¬
ever, that they would be unable to contest the elections and on
15 September they issued a manifesto withdrawing their candi¬
dature.88

86Servant, 15 September 1920. M.R. Jayakar,, The Story of My Life,

(Bombay, 1958-9) Vol. I, pp. 390-7.
87E.g. see Hindusthan, 9 September 1920.
88Servant. 15 September 1920.
 154 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

In the twelve weeks that remained before Congress met again

at Nagpur there was much confused activity among Eengal
Congressmen and Khilafatists. Abul Kalam Azad’s party was
busy discouraging Muslim voters from going to the polls,89
while Das, Chakravarti and B.C. Pal travelled extensively in
Eastern Bengal in an attempt to rally their dispersed suppor¬
ters.90 The popular excitement over Gandhi’s activities which
had been mounting steadily through the year had reached such
a pitch that it had engulfed many who earlier had been sceptical.
Andrews was one of them. Tt is good to be alive in these days/
he wrote delightedly on 1 November,‘even if one has not the
heaven, which Wordsworth speaks of, of being young.’ In this
atmosphere there was no place for equivocation and the cry
‘For or against?’ became insistent. ‘Are you a whole-hogger?
If so you are a non-cooperator. Do you contend that some of
the items in the programme are calculated to do more harm
to the people than to the bureaucracy? Well, damn you, you are
no non-cooperator but a renegade.’91
This mood augured ill for the success of the revisionist
party at Nagpur, but it was determined not to let the issue go
by default and it was as active as its opponents in organising
supporters for the trip to the Central Provinces. The result was
an extraordinary migration. ‘ . . . whilst many of the promi¬
nent politicians were present, the Bengal contingent included
hundreds of ex-detenus and the intelligentsia, which dominated
earlier Congresses, seems to have been swamped in a mass of
semi-educated persons swept up from all parts of India’,
reported the Government of India.92
Within the Bengal delegation there were a number of warring
groups manoeuvring for ascendency, and feeling between them
was so embittered that the two meetings held on 26 and 27
December to elect the province’s representatives on the Subjects
Committee, both ended in ugly free-for-all fights. Order was

89Government of India, Reforms Office Proceedings, March 1921,

B34-99. Bundle January-March 1921 (5).
°°Amrita Bazar Patrika, 9 November 1920.
01Ibid., 24 November 1920.
“"“Government of India, Home Department Political Branch Pro¬
ceedings, Deposit 3 (Confidential) and K-W, July 1921.
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 155

restored only when Gandhi intervened in person.93

Das had come to Nagpur determined to offer stout resistance
to non-cooperation but it was now clear that he could not even
carry the whole Bengal contingent with him if he opposed
Gandhi. With a grand gesture he turned defeat into victory.
Having secured Gandhi’s private assurance that he would be
left free to pursue his own political propaganda, he made the
dramatic announcement that he would move the main resolution
in support of non-cooperation.94
With one stroke Das had dished his rivals. Provided he
could carry his own group with him—and his personal influence
was sufficient to enable him to do this—he now had a chance to
unite the whole contingent under his leadership. He had stolen his
opponents’ platform and by securing Gandhi’s endorsement had
climbed a step above them. They remained merely provincial poli¬
ticians, while he had reasserted himself as a national figure. Most
important of all he could now return to Bengal with a reunited
battalion at his back and a job of work in hand. Even had he
been successful in persuading the Congress in favour of council
entry, he would have been unable to provide action for his
party, for the first elections were over and the Moderates
ensconced in the legislatures for a three-year term. With non¬
cooperation he had a task for his eager followers, and a popular
task at that.

IX

This story’s epilogue was written by the Bengal Congressmen

in 1921 in the distinctive (or, as Gandhi thought, deviant)
character which they gave the province’s civil disobedience
movement, and in 1922 in their support for the Swaraj Party.
But that epilogue must be told elsewhere for we already have
ample material on which to reflect.
The first general point to be made is one underlined by Das’
action at Nagpur: then in these twelve months there had been
a profound shift in the balance between national and provincial

93Banerji, At the Cross-Roads, p. 146. Bengalee, 30 December 1920

and 1 January 1921.
94P.C. Ray, Life and Times of C.R. Das, (London, 1927), p. 159.
156 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

politics. Up until this time nationalist politics in each pro¬

vince had been an almost autonomous system. The power of
nationalist leaders was regionally based, and their authority,
though not their influence, was regionally restricted. They
might advise or cajole their fellow nationalists in other pro¬
vinces, but they could not dictate their internal policy or inter¬
fere in their internal organisation. A provincial leader with
sound regional backing could comfortably disregard ‘national’
opinion. All this had been permanently changed in 1920. As
Das acknowledged with his Nagpur decision, there were now
two interdependent power structures, the national and the pro¬
vincial, and to maintain his influence the nationalist politician
would have to gain a secure position in both. The old-style
Congress, a federation of provincial grandees, was being des¬
troyed by Gandhi’s consolidation of the powers of the All-
India Congress executive and his intrusions into provincial
politics.
How could Gandhi do what others had failed to do before
him? Basically because his new appeals had won him the
support of social groups which previously had had no share in
nationalist politics. The dynamics underlying the emerg¬
ence of these groups are still unclear for although it has long
been conventional to comment on the significance of Indian
social change in the second decade of the twentieth century,
there has been as yet no serious analysis of it. Even so we can
assert reasonably surely that Gandhi drew his most solid
support from areas which formerly had played no major part in
the nationalist movement, and, in the old nationalist regions,
from social groups which had formerly no voice in nationalist
policy.
For the old nationalist elites there were serious consequences.
Their political power was simultaneously challenged at a number
of levels, and, as a result, they felt threatened in their social
dominance. They found that the organisational forms and
techniques of leadership which had served them well in the
past were no longer effective. At best they were uncomfort¬
able with the new language and symbolism of mass politics
which Gandhi had introduced to Indian nationalism. At worst
they were totally inept.
In their attitude to Gandhi himself they were caught in a
THE NON-COOPERATION DECISION 157

cleft stick. While on the one hand they could not deny his
charisma, on the other they resented deeply his imposition
upon the nationalist movement of a doctrine of action which to
them seemed the product of an alien culture. As though to rub
salt in the wound, Gandhi described ‘satyagraha’ as the tradi¬
tional Indian mode of action, and offered it to his countrymen,
particularly to the political elites, as an alternative to imported
European methods—an alternative which would enable them to
reassert their cultural integrity. To many of the elite this was an
offensive assertion. In essence it appeared to differ little from the
hated British jibe that they were not ‘real Indians’, and it show¬
ed a similar insensitivity to their intellectual and emotional
commitment to the sophisticated syncretic cultures which they
had developed and on which their identity was based. Here we
are at the root of the conflict between Gandhi and the old
political elites. Their visions of India, present and future, and
Gandhi's vision differed fundamentally, and in defence of their
visions of the future they resisted his ambition to use the extend¬
ed powers of a reconstructed Congress to achieve his vision.
 7

Four Lives: History as Biography

... we suspect that historians, when they try to separate

the logic of the historic event from that of the life histories
which intersect in it, ieave a number of vital historical prob¬
lems unattended.
Erik H. Erikson1

How strange that social scientists should have forgotten people.

All of us—historians, anthropologists, sociologists, demogra¬
phers, political scientists, psychologists, and even perhaps lingu¬
ists, geographers and economists—ostensibly study people, yet
people appear remarkably seldom in our writings. Systems,
networks, models, inputs and outputs, value perceptions, kin
groups, elites, and even classes, castes and parties if we are
slightly old-fashioned, with these our work abounds; but recog¬
nizable men and women are hard to find.
Where do they get lost? Many, I suspect, disappear among
the punch cards and the magnetic tape of the behaviourists,
victims of the passion to reduce warm individuals to cold
quantifiable indices. Others are pushed impatiently aside by
more traditional historians and political scientists, too busy with

1Young Man Luther. A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New

York, paperback edition 1962), p. 16.
HISTORY AS BIOGRAPHY 159

great events and the grand processes of change to have time for
people. That we gain from these generalized conceptual studies
there is no question and my caveat against them should not be
taken too seriously, but I think we should be aware of what we
are in danger of losing if we hustle people out of our work.
We may lose, in the first place, an appreciation that people
make events: that individual decisions often count; that bold
or foolish actions, muddle-headed thinking, pure funk or respon¬
sible restraint can all make dents in the course of history—
though the dents are rarely those intended. We may also lose
a sense of the mixture of motives with which men and women
act in a world in which public duty rarely coincides with family
commitments or personal gain. Unless we remain aware of
people as breathing, eating, loving, cursing, petulant and des¬
tructible beings we lose our ability to empathize with their
predicaments and their pain. We are careful to stamp our IBM
cards with the warning: “Do not bend, staple or mutilate”,
but people carry no such protective legend and they are contin¬
ually bent, stapled and mutilated by others. If our research
has no room for human anguish or if it will allow only for a
mechanical tabulation of injuries, we do no better than the
perpetrators of those obscene lists of bomb tonnage and body
counts which have dehumanized the reporting of war in the
mass media.
The temptation is always to attach an absurdly exaggerated
importance to the words and actions of public men, and we
shall do well to remember that many men in politics “splash
about like a baby in its bath” (as the mighty Gladstone was
once described), with as little regard for the gravity of the
moment and with as much fun. If, finally, we forget how
ridiculous people often are, our work will become totally
humourless.
All this serves as an introduction, and I trust a justification,
for the material presented here: the stories of the lives of three
men and one woman born in India just one century ago. Each
was involved with the great events that fill the pages of our
history books: some shaping those events, all shaped by them.
I hope these narratives, if they do nothing more, will convey
some sense of the delight which one social scientist finds in the
lives of people.
160 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

An Unwanted Liberal

Our first subject was born in 1868 at Midnapore, Bengal, of a

family that had enjoyed unbroken employment under the
British Raj since 1760. While still in his teens he saw his father
active in the early Indian National Congress, and when a decade
later as a Calcutta High Court barrister he was elected to the
city corporation, he was an equally ardent advocate of national¬
ism. Yet he is unremembered in India today and he will, I
suspect, find no place in the current dictionary of Indian
nationalist biographies. The reason: he was an Englishman, not
an Indian.
The man was Evan Cotton, whose more famous father,
Henry, delighted Indians and sorely vexed his fellow Indian
Civil Service officers with his radical opinions. “It is an easy
thing to exercise irresponsible authority”, wrote the elder
Cotton in 1906 soon after his retirement, “but it is a sublimer
function of Imperial dominion to lead and guide and train the
people of the country to manage their own affairs, to afford
scope to their political aspirations, to wait upon and encourage
their sense of self-help and self-reliance through the details of
executive work.”2 Son Evan fully subscribed to these views and
after the formation of a Liberal government in Britain in 1906
he gave up his prospering legal practice to go to London to
work for Indian reforms. He was appointed editor of mdia,
the London weekly journal of the National Congress. With his
father newly seated in parliament where he joined a vociferous
group of critics of the British Indian administration, and with
a personal network of press contacts from his earlier work as
Calcutta correspondent for British newspapers, Evan Cotton
could stir up real trouble for the officials in India if he chose.
For this we have the testimony of Sir Herbert Risley, Home
Member of the Government of India. In June 1906 Risely
tersely advised his colleagues to drop a proposed police bill,
noting that the legislation embodied principles to which Evan
Cotton had explicitly objected a few years earlier. With Cotton
now the editor of a London newspaper, Risley observed, “a
very nasty agitation could be whipped up at Home” if the

2Statesman, 8 May 1906.

FOUR LIVES 161

government were to persist with its proposals.3

Whether Cotton had the satisfaction of knowing the extent
of his influence we cannot tell, for in this case, as in many
others, the historian’s role is similar to that of the recipient of
a posthumous military honour for a fallen relative. Though he
knows that devotion to duty has had its just reward, he doubts
that the combatant ever realized that his efforts were appre¬
ciated. With Cotton there is clear evidence that his sixteen
years in London, 1906-22, left him sadly disappointed. He
laboured all this time for the extension of parliamentary govern¬
ment to India, and his long period of editorial service was
capped with an invitation from Edwin Montagu to join an
India Office committee to assist in the preparation of the
Government of India Bill. But the same year—1918—saw the
capture of the Indian National Congress by the Extremists and
their rejection of the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals. The
Moderates, with whom Cotton had worked since the beginning
of the century, were driven out of the organization they had
founded.
The year 1918 also brought him a personal setback. For
many years he had hoped for a seat in the House of Commons.
He had served his apprenticeship as a London County Council¬
lor, and he had unsuccessfully contested parliamentary elections
as a Liberal candidate. His chance finally came at a by-election
in July 1918, but just five months later he lost his seat in the
general elections following the end of World War I. He was
dealt another severe blow when the exchange value of the rupee
dropped sharply because of a trade recession in 1920, depleting
his Indian savings on which he had become increasingly depend¬
ent. He was fifty and thoroughly well trained for nothing
except agitation for Indian home rule—an unprofitable line of
business for an Englishman.
What was left for him? Perhaps he could return to India
and work in one of the newly expanded branches of government.
But whom could he approach for such a job? Certainly not the
I.C.S. officers who had been his lifelong targets of attack. Those
whom he was still describing in public print as “the autocrats

’Minute, 20 June 1906, Government of India Home Department

Police, A Proceedings Nos. 20-34, December 1907.
162 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

of yesterday” nursing ambitions to be “the veiled despots of

today”4 could hardly be expected to respond kindly to a plea
for patronage from him. However, the Moderate politicians
surely owed him something, and they now held ministerial
posts in the reformed governments. In June 1921 he appealed
to one of the most influential among them, Tej Bahadur Sapru,
the Allahabad lawyer newly appointed Law Member of the
Government of India. “I hope you will not mind my making
this request of you”, wrote Cotton. “But who am I to approach
if it be not my Indian friends who are acquainted with my
qualifications and with all my views on Indian questions?” He
reminded Sapru of his sacrifice in leaving Calcutta many years
before, and spoke of his current financial difficulties.

I lead a “rotten life”. I have given up my house and with

my wife and daughter am living in a cheap Bayswater board¬
ing house. My books are all stored, I have resigned my
club, and beyond tobacco deny myself every luxury. Even so
I am obliged to borrow to pay my income tax. . . I am in
the best of health and feel that I am being wasted. All my
interest lies in India and I am anxious to put at her disposal
the fruits of my fourteen years here of public life. . . . Men
are being brought out to India who are wholly ignorant of
the country and its people and its problems.... I want so
much to be of use to her just now: but no one seems to
think of me.5

How unsatisfactory was the response to this pathetic appeal can

be judged from Cotton’s bitter remark two months later: “My
friends show no reluctance to make use of my knowledge—
when it can be had gratis.”6
In fact Evan Cotton was to have his chance, but it came
from an unexpected quarter. In March 1922 the Earl of Lytton,
Edwin Montagu’s Under-Secretary at the Indian Office, was

4‘Parties and Policies in India’. Contemporary Review, vol. CXIX,

no. 662, February 1921, p. 176. See also ‘The Viceroyalty of Lord
Chelmsford’, ibid., no. 666, June 1921, pp. 764-770.
JCottcn to Sapru, 9 June 1921, C. 42, Sapru Papers, National
Library of India, Calcutta.
“Cotton to Sapru, 4 August 1921, C. 43, ibid.
FOUR LIVES 163

appointed Governor of Bengal, and he invited Cotton to serve

as President of the Provincial Legislative Council.7 Cotton was
delighted to accept, and there can be no doubt that the sub¬
sequent eighteen months were among the happiest in his life.
At last he had the prestigious office so long sought. He was
back in the city he loved, working closely with his old national¬
ist comrades in parliamentary institutions he had helped to
shape.
It was good but it could not last. The powerful Bengali
nationalists were no longer the old Moderates in the Legisla¬
tive Council, but the group of younger men under the leader¬
ship of Chittaranjan Das who had mounted a spectacular
agitation against British rule during the Non-Cooperation
Movement of 1921. They had been rewarded for their efforts
with a year in prison, but they were free by 1923 and pledged
to smash the legislative institutions which they denounced as
a false facade to British despotism. These men were revolu¬
tionaries, with no place in their ranks for bleeding-heart
liberals, Indian or British. Cotton was soon to feel the sting
of their scorn. At the general elections in November 1923
their Swaraj Party crushed the Moderates and entered the
Bengal Legislative Council well organized to obstruct its pro¬
ceedings. The Swarajists immediately began a running fight
with the Council President over points of procedure, contesting
every possible ruling from the Chair in an attempt to discredit
Evan Cotton and his office. There were rowdy demonstrations
on the opposition benches, which frequently had vocal support
from the visitors’ galleries, and on a number of occasions
the Swarajists staged walk-outs when they failed to get their
way.8 Cotton was reviled in the nationalist press as an enemy
of Indian freedom: “The unworthy son of Sir Henry Cotton”.9
He was mortally offended by these personal attacks, and
worse was to come. Under the Montagu-Chelmsford constitu¬
tion the Council Presidency became an elective office in 1925,
and Swaraj Party opposition ensured that Cotton was ousted

7Earl of Lytton: Pundits and Elephants, being the experiences of Five

Years as Governor of an Indian Province (London, 1942), pp. 36-37.
8For details see J.H. Broomfield: Elite Conflict in a Plural Society:
Twentieth-Century Bengal (Berkeley, 1968), pp. 244-257.
9Nayak, 26 March 1924.
 164 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

in favour of a Bengali. A laudatory farewell address by the

Governor and a knighthood could not salve the wound Cotton
had suffered. He returned to England an embittered man,
and from this time until his death in 1939 he was an outspoken
opponent of further constitutional advance for India.10

A Political Grasshopper

In a photograph of the members of the Bengal Legislative

Council taken in 1928, a stern, mustachioed Evan Cotton sits
resplendent in President’s wig and gown in the centre of the
front row. Towards the rear of the group can be discerned a
somewhat dishevelled, rotund figure, whose moon face and
protruding ears were already the delight of India’s political
cartoonists.11 This was one of the most famous and certainly
one of the most controversial figures in Bengal’s stormy
tvventieth-centurv political history. His name: Abul Kasem
Fazlul Huq.
The mention of Fazlul Huq to the older generation in
either wing of Bengal is guaranteed to evoke a response, more
often than not an impassioned response. Looking back
through my notes of interviews of the last ten years I find
every shade of opinion on this man. “. . . no ba’ance”, says
one.12 “Not a brilliant man'’, says another, “but he had a big
heart. He was always a bit of a rustic; a country politician,
rough, with few wiles and always willing to take up a problem
if he thought it was for the general good.”13 “. . . an unscru¬
pulous politician”, says a third. “He was out for his own ends,
for what he could get. He wasn't a good man at all.”14 “He
felt for the masses”, says the editor of Dacca newspaper.

10Lytton, op. cite, cf. Even Cotton: ‘Some Outstanding Political

Leaders,’ Political India, 1832-1932 (ed. John Cumming, London, 1932),
pp. 186-193. For fuller biographical information on Cotton see his
obituary notice, The Times, London, 8 March 1939; Who's Who, 1926-,
and C.H. Philips’ foreword to Evan Cotton and Charles Fawcett: East
Indiamen (London, 1949).
“Photograph in the collection of Bourne and Shepherd, Photogra¬
phers, Calcutta.
“Hemendra Prasad Ghose, Calcutta, 11 January 1961.
1SJ.L. Llewellyn, Calcutta, 11 January 1961.
“Maulana Akram Khan, Dacca, 12 December 1960.
 FOUR LIVES 165

“He had a genuine sympathy for the people.’’15 . a rogue

to the fingertips,” is the comment of a former British I.C.S.
officer. “A very dishonest politician. ... He was a real
demagogue. Mind you, I liked him personally. But he was a
rogue.”16
There are only two areas of real agreement about Fazlul
Huq’s personality. One is that he was thoroughly unpredict¬
able—like a grasshopper, as someone described him to me;
you never knew which way he would jump next. In the writ¬
ten record of Huq's long political career one can find numerous
instances to demonstrate that this popular view of the man
is not unjust. For example, after years of outspoken criticism
of the British for withholding parliamentary government from

l0Abul Kalem Shams-uddin, Dacca, 13 December 1960.

16Sir Percival Griffiths, Calcutta, 11 December 1961. Cf. the following
comment from another I.C.S. officer (F.O. Bell to author, 4 June 1973):
“I had a good deal of contact with Fazlul Huq, when I was Magistrate-
Collector of Bakarganj, in 1941-43, and F.H. was Chief Minister of
Bengal. He was a likeable old rascal, who would always greet me with a
smile, and usually a bear like hug, when I went down to the Barisal
steamer ghat to meet him whenever he came to the district headquarters.
He was physically, a big man—perhaps also a big man politically, as he
had a contact with the East Bengal peasants, and a gift of speech, which
was known to few others. The gossip which one heard from Bengali
officers was to the effect ‘Mr. Fazlul Huq is a good man. He never takes
money for himself—always for his friends.’ His resignation from the
provincial civil service is a little hard to understand—unless he always
intended to go into politics after the end of the first partition. I had
heard the story of his disappointment at not getting the post of Registrar
of Co-operative Societies in the 1912 Bengal from Sir John Woodhead,
who had been then a rather junior officer in the Faridpur district. He
remembered Faz grumbling about this on some occasion when they had
met in 1912. Faz’s dissatisfaction is more difficult to understand, because
the Registrar of Co-op. Societies for the reconstituted Bengal province
in April 1912, was W.H. Buchan (Willie) a civilian, and senior to
Fazlul Huq. (Buchan incidentally, was a brother of a John Buchan, the
novelist, member of Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ and as lord Tweedsmuir,
Governor General of Canada). But Buchan died in November 1912, and
perhaps it was after this when a Hindu provincial service member (J.M.
Mitra) was appointed Registrar, that Huq took offence. Perhaps Huq
would have made more of the Co-operative moevment, because in my
experience of Bengal, it did not seem to have made much impact upon
the life of the province—certainly nothing like that of the Co-operative
movement in the Punjab, as revealed in Malcolm Darling’s books.”
166 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

India, he performed a volteface before the Reforms Advisory

Committee in 1924 by insisting that representative institutions
were unsuited to Indian conditions.17 It was no coincidence
that he was then a Minister in the Bengal government and
subjected to that same harassment from the Swaraj Party
which alienated Evan Cotton. Huq turned an even more
spectacular somersault when Chief Minister of Bengal in
1941. Hindu-Muslim rioting had been widespread in the pro¬
vince since August of the prevous year and Huq as leader
of the Muslim League had clashed bitterly with Shyama Prasad
Mookerjee, Hindu Mahasabha president, each man publicly
denouncing the other as a wicked, irresponsible politician
whose evil ambitions were tearing asunder Bengal society.18
Then in December, amid general amazement, Huq reconstruct¬
ed his government to include S.P. Mookerjee as Minister of
Finance.19
Unpredictability was certainly one of his traits. The other
which is remembered was his remarkable popular appeal to
Bengalis of both religions. Some people hated him—of this
there is no question—but many more regarded him with warm
affection. For one thing he was a Bengali first and last, which
meant much in that chauvinistic region. For another he never
lost the common touch; he was—as one of my interviewers
put it—always a bit of a rustic. The stories told of him are
legion and he is usually cast in the role of a buffoon. One tale
has him appearing at a formal dinner at Government House
toothless, having lent his false teeth to a young cousin who
had broken his and had a wedding to attend No one, as I
recall it, has ever suggested that Fazlul Huq would refuse a
bribe, and, by the same token, no one has suggested that he
could ever be relied upon to do what he was bribed to do. He
had a quick temper, an angry tongue and a rich vocabulary.
Typical was his retort to some critics in 1920: “The wisest

17Hindu, 20 October 1924; cf. Huq’s note on the working of the

reformed constitution, 5 July 1924, P.P., Cmd. 2362, 1924-5, vol. X,
pp. 630-631.
18E g. see Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings, 9 April 1941,
vol. LIX, no. 6, pp. 204-219.
“Reginald Coupland: Report on the Constitutional Problem in India
(London, 1942-1943), pt 2, p. 30.
FOUR LIVES 167

amongst them do not possess the brains of a barn-door fowl”.20

Much of his invective was directed at the British and their
Indian administration. Addressing his fellow members of
Congress in 1918 he said:

My own experience of the Englishman teaches me that there

are some very prominent characteristics in his character.
One is that he is about one of the most conceited of human
beings on the face of the earth. . . he believes most sincere¬
ly that he has been created by God Almighty himself and
that the rest of mankind has been created by some agency
with whom God has no concern. ... He cannot appreciate
points of view different from his own. We hear of the angle
of vision, but with an Englishman it is either an obtuse
angle or an acute angle; but never the right angle. . . yet
I give him credit, not because he is sincere, but because
he is dull. It is a very difficult set of people whom we have
to deal with.21

Fazlul Huq could clown when he wished but we must not

be misled by that into underrating his importance. For one
thing he was so long on the scene. Born in 1873, only five
years after Evan Cotton, he outlived him by more than two
decades. His political life spanned a full half-century, from
his first involvement with the Muslim League in its inaugural
year, 1906, to his involuntary retirement from the Governorship
of East Pakistan in 1958.
In this long career there were five distinguishable phases,
the first lasting seven years, during which time he was a protege
of Khwaja Salimulla, Nawab of Dacca. Fazlul Huq was a
Bangal(an East Bengali) being born of a family of Barisal
lawyers. He followed the well-worn path to Calcutta for edu¬
cation, finishing on the benches of the elite Presidency College.
In 1895, aged twenty-two, he returned to Barisal with the
degrees of Master of Arts and Bachelor of Laws to teach in
the local college. Later he assisted his father with his legal

20Englishman, 24 August 1920.

21Report of the Special Session of the Indian National Congress held
at Bombay, 29-31 August and 1 September 1918 (Bombay, 1918,,
pp. 95-96.
168 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

practice. After five years Calcutta drew him back and he

became an articled clerk to the great High Court lawyer,
Asutosh Mookerjee. The discussion over the partition of
Bengal found him keenly supporting the measure, and his first
opportunity for political work came in 1906, when the Nawab
of Dacca used him as a runner in his negotiations with Muslim
leaders in other parts of northern India prior to the formation
of the Muslim League. The Nawab had at his disposal a
number of government appointments in the new province of
Eastern Bengal and Assam and he was able to reward Huq
with a place in the Provincial Executive Service. By 1908 he
had become Assistant Registrar of Rural Co-operative Socie¬
ties. At the time of reunification in 1912, however, he was
aggrieved at his non-appointment as Registrar for the whole
of Bengal, and he left the service in disgust. Again the Nawab
came to his aid, ensuring his unopposed return for the Dacca
Muslim seat in the Legislative Council.
Here was a potential Muslim leader of a new kind. Unlike
the traditional communal leader, whose influence was locally
based on landholding and who was usually a member of one
of the great Muslim families, Huq had made his way by
personal ability—for it was his ability which had won him
the necessary patronage. His education and his experience
in teaching, law, administration, and political organization
set him apart from the old leadership and, what was equally
important, made him acceptable as a bhadralok. Here was a
Muslim who (to adapt W.S. Gilbert; was the very model of
a modern politician. It was important, too, that while retain¬
ing his contacts with his Eastern Bengal district he had establish¬
ed himself as a figure in Calcutta, for this enabled him to
provide communal leadership on a new level.
Equally significant was the fact that his anger—personal
and communal—was directed primarily at the Government.
Although remaining a communalist, he would be willing on
occasions to ally with other groups in attacks upon that
government, for he shared with other bhadralok aspirations
quite foreign to the old Muslim leaders. In the years that
followed, under the influence of pan-lslamism and a growing
distrust of British intentions toward the Khilafat, men like
Huq were willing to form an alliance with the Hindus that
FOUR LIVES 169

would have horrified their predecessors.

Fazlul Huq broke with the Dacca Nawab in 1913, rejecting
his patron’s carefully devised strategy of reliance upon the
British, bat until Salimulla’s death in January 1915 Huq’s
influence was limited. His election as secretary of the Bengal
Presidency Muslim League later in that year finally gave him
an independent power base. Respoding to appeals from Bengal
Congressmen for a Hindu-Muslim alliance to secure constitu¬
tional concessions, the younger bhadralok Muslims like Huq
now offered their community a new political strategy. The
best future for the Bengal Muslims, as they saw it, lay in a
nationalist alliance with the Hindu bhadralok against the
common enemy, the British. The aim was to wrest power from
the British; this power was then to be divided according to
a prearranged scheme which would give the Muslims their fair
share.
On this basis Fazlul Huq and his men entered into a series
of negotiations with Congressmen and Muslim Leaguers from
other provinces, which produced a reform scheme jointly adopt¬
ed by the Indian National Congress and the All-India Muslim
League at Lucknow in December 1916. The Lucknow Pact
was a remarkable diplomatic victory for the Muslim League,
embodying as it did the principle of separate communal electo¬
rates and a large measure of over-representation for Muslims
in most provincial legislative councils. Howevei, in the Punjab
and Bengal, the two Muslim-majority provinces, the Hindus
were given special concessions. This was an unpopular decision
with the Bengal Muslims and there was anger with those who
had agreed to disadvantageous terms. Fazlul Huq and his
associates were accused of selling-out the Muslim community
to the Hindus, and there was a reaction against collaboration.
Despite this, Huq maintained his association with the
National Congress and vigorously resisted the renewed separa¬
tist trends in his community. “On the question of Hindu-
Muslim relations 1 consider it a gross libel on both communities
to say that the Hindu is the natural enemy of the Mussalmans”,
he told the Muslim League in December 1918.22 Such talk

^Presidential Address, All-India Muslim League Session, Delhi,

30 December 1918, Azizul Huq collection, Dacca.
170 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

simply strengthened the general opinion that he was a Cong¬

ress stooge, and his influence with his co-religionists in Bengal
was further sapped.23
This second phase in Huq’s career—the phase of nationalist
collaboration—came to an end in 1920 when he refused to
subscribe to Gandhi’s non-cooperation programme, insisting
that the British would be the chief beneficiaries of a nationalist
boycott of the legislatures.24 With this action he effectively
read himself out of the Congress movement, but he was still
unwilling to stand forth as a communalist. For a Bengal Muslim
politician to deny the encouragement to separatism which the
1919 constitution gave, with its communal electorates and its
enfranchisement of half a million Muslim peasantry, was to
fly in the face of an opportunity for power. This was an ‘‘error”
into which Fazlul Huq was almost led by his nationalist senti¬
ments. In the 1920s he had only a shadow of his former influ¬
ence as he struggled to devise a new method suitable to the
changed political conditions. Success came when he realized
that the rural economy was an excellent ground on which the
Muslim politician might recruit mass support, and he was given
his chance of power when, in 1935, another 4 million peasants
were enfranchised.
This was the fourth phase of his career and it can be dated
from July 1929 when he founded the Krishak Praja (Peasants*
and People’s) Party. With its backing he was elected Mayor
of Calcutta in 1935 and in the 1937 general elections his party
captured thirty-four seats in the Bengal Legislative Assembly.25
It had campaigned on a platform of radical rural reform and
won the votes of Hindu as well as Muslim peasantry. Huq now
formed a coalition with the Scheduled Caste party and the
Muslim League to implement the programme. His ministry
honoured many of its election promises in its six years of life.

23ror a fuller discussion of this phase of Huq’s career see-

above, pp. 92-108.
^Presidential Address, Bengal Provincial Conference, Midnapur,.
3 April 1920, Azizul Huq collection, Dacca; Englishman, 23 August
1920; Servant, 19 December 1920.
25Indian Annual Register, 1937, vol. I, p. 4; Coupland, op. cit.„
p. 27.
FOUR LIVES 171

That it survived so long was due largely to fancy footwork

by Huq, of which the alliance with Shyama Pra-sad Mookerjee,
cited earlier, was but one example.
In its first years Huq’s government was heavily dependent
on Muslim League votes and Huq personally took an active
part in All-India Muslim League politics. It was he who
moved the Pakistan Resolution at Lahore in 1940.26 In 1941,
however, he fell out with Jinnah, whom he accused of meddling
in Bengal affairs.27 With the League members on the opposition
benches, the balance of power in the Bengal Assembly was
thereafter held by the European bloc. They kept Huq in office
only as long as it suited them, finally dumping him in March
1943.28

If there was any one Muslim leader in Bengal who, despite

his unpredictable temperament, could have held a reasonable
section of the Muslims and Hindus of the province together,
it was Fazlul Huq. His temporary exit from the scene of
Bengal politics at a crucial juncture .. . left the Muslim
League free to forge ahead with its plans for partition.

This is the judgement of V.P. Menon in his Transfer of

Power.29 Whether correct or not, it is a judgement often echoed
in West Bengal. Fazlul Huq encouraged such an interpretation
by visiting Calcutta shortly after his appointment as Chief
Minister of East Pakistan in 1954, and stating that he “would
not take notice of the fact that there was a political division of
the Province of Bengal into East and West.”30
Ambivalence towards the Pakistan ideal is the distinguishing

26Indian Annual Register, 1940, vol I, p. 312.

27B. Shiva Rao to Tej Bahadur Sapru, 22 October 1941, R. 175/28,
Sapru Papers, National Library of India, Calcutta; Coupland, op cit.,
pp. 29-30; M.A H. Ispanani: Qaid-e-Azam Jinnah as I Knew Him (Karachi,
1966), pp. 46-53.
28A.K. Fazlul Huq: Bengal Today (Calcutta, 1944); V.P. Menon: The
Transfer of Power in India (Princeton, 1957), pp. 150-151.
29Ibid., p. 151.
3°Quoted in Richard D. Lambert: “Factors in Bengali Regionalism
in Pakistan”, Far Eastern Survey, vol. XXVIII, rio. 4, April 1959,
pp. 56-57.
172 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

characteristic of the last phase of Huq’s career. His enmity

towards Jinnah and the Muslim League, the architects of
partition, was patent, but he went to East Bengal in 1947 and
later accepted an appointment as provincial Advocate General
in a League Ministry. This office he resigned when the first
general elections were announced for March 1954. He reformed
the old Praja Party under the title Krishak Sramik (Peasants’
and Workers’) Party to campaign on a platform of autonomy
for East Pakistan. His Lahore Resolution of 1940, he reminded
the electors, had spoken of two sovereign Muslim nations, one
in the north-west and the other in the north-east of the sub¬
continent. This separatist appeal was incredibly popular in
Bengal, The Muslim League was annihilateda at the polls and
Huq, as the leader of a large United Front, formed a Ministry.
The central government, however, saw the threat to the inte¬
grity of Pakistan, and, after Huq's provocative remarks in
Calcutta, removed him from office. Threatening legal action,
the Prime Minister denounced Huq as “a self-confessed traitor
to Pakistan”, and the latter held discretion the better part of
valour. He announced that he was retiring from political life
on account of his advanced age. Few believed that he really
meant it, and he remained a force in East Pakistan politics.31
To maintain order in Bengal the Karachi government had
to buy Fazlul Huq off. In 1955 he was made Minister of the
Interior in the central Cabinet, and a year later he was ap¬
pointed Governor of East Pakistan. With a characteristic
disregard for constitutional propriety, he combined this office
with the continued leadership of the Krishak Sramik Party,
then the main opposition group in the East Wing. His repeated
political interventions finally forced the President to dismiss
him in April 19 5 8.32 The military coup in the following Octo¬
ber prevented any chance of a comeback and Fazlul Huq died
in 1962 in his eighty-ninth year. I think we can justly say he
had lived a full life.33

31Keith Challard: Pakistan: A Political Study (London, 1957),

pp. 57-59 & 72-73.
32K.J. Newman: ‘Pakistan’s Preventive Autocracy and its Causes’,
Pacific Affairs, vol. XXXII, no. 1, March 1959, pp. 29-30.
33For fuller biographical information on Huq see his obituary notice,
The Times, London, 28 April 1962; Indian Year Book and Who's Who,
FOUR LIVES 173

An Independent Country Gentleman

Let us turn the clock back once again, this time to 1926:
the year in which Evan Cotton departed sadly from India, a
victim of what he described as the “Tammany Hall” machina¬
tions of C.R. Das.34 Fazlul Huq was also without a job in
1926, having lost his Ministerial portfolio 18 months earlier
when the Swaraj Party struck his salary from the provincial
budget.30 Wathching these developments from a distance and
commenting upon them in his diary was a Bankura zamindar,
Satya Kinkar Sahana. “P.ead today’s paper”, wrote Sahana
on 5 January 1926. “The Swarajists seem to gain in influence.
. .. The bureaucrats are probably making many mistakes.
Their attempt to crush the new spirit by penal methods is doing
more to swell the camp of Swarajists than the propaganda work
of the Congress.”36 And again, in April, he noted:

Thought over the political situation of the country and

the doings of the present political parties. The present
condition of the country does not favour representative
form of Government. Til! the Hindu community shake off
its lethargy and timidness of centuries there will be no pact
between the Hindus & Mahommedans; no friendly relation is
possible between the strong and the weak.37

Satya Kinkar Sahana was then fifty-two years old, and, like
many other ambitious and locally influential men in India, he
was attracted by the idea of a seat in the provincial legislature.
Would it not be exciting to play a part in the public life of
Calcutta which he had always followed so closely? Certainly

1939-40 (Calcutta, 1940); A.S.M. Abdur Rab: A.K. Fazlul Haq: Life and
Achievements (Lahore, 1966); Kalipada Biswas: Jukta Banglar Shesh
Adhyay (Calcutta, 1966) (Because of inaccuracies, the last two references
should be used with some caution.)
31iSome Outstanding Political Leaders’, op. cit., p. 190.
35Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings, 26 August 1924, vol. XVI,
pp. 46-69.
3SDiaries of Satya Kinkar Sahana Vidyavinode, Ananda Kutir,
Bankura. (I am deeply indebted to the Sahana family, in pait'.cular
Sri Paresh Bijoy Sahana, for giving me access to their papers.)
371 April 1926.
174 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

it would enhance his prestige in his district, and, besides give

him many influential contacts in the capital that could be useful
in his business affairs. Perhaps he even had a contribution
to make to the protection of Hindu interests, which he believed
were threatened in Bengal by unreasonable Muslim demands.
There were elections at the end of 1926 but Sahana let this
opportunity pass, waiting another three years before trying his
luck. He was then successful and he went to the Legislative
Council for two terms totalling almost seven years.
His diaries through these years make fascinating reading.
We see the earnest junior member swotting up the Council
rules and standing orders (“I should have thoroughly mastered
it by now”)38 and busying himself to ensure that Bankura
friends are “comfortably seated” in the visitors’ gallery. We
see him deferentially cultivating the great names (“Talk with
Sir P.C. [Mitter]. He has got a long experience of all affairs
and to talk to him is to learn many things”),39 eagerly accepting
invitations to their tea parties and mightily pleased when they
compliment him on one of his none-too-frequent speeches.
Then as the novelty wears off and assurance grows, the big
men are cut down to size. There are reports of “laughing in
the sleeves”40 at the pompous nonsense talked by one office¬
holder or another. Throughout there is evidence of careful
attention to the details of legislation, and a willingness to listen
to both sides of an argument before settling his vote.
Sahana, it is clear, was never comfortable beneath a party
banner. It is equally clear that he drew a sharp distinction
between men like himself and those whom he described as
“politicians”. “I have been seriously thinking of the deplor¬
able condition of my country”, he writes in November 1936.
“No thinking is to be found amongst those who dabble in
politics; only knocking at the door of sentimentality which has
proved a bane to my Province.”41 This is an interesting distinc¬
tion, for it draws our attention to the point that there were
men in Indian public life before 1947 who had little to do with
the politics which most of our historians assure us were all

3818 August 1930.

3922 March 1930.
409 January 1934.
41Diary, 11 November 1936.
FOUR LIVES 175

important: the politics of nationalism. The fact of the matter

is that there was a great deal of politics to which nationalism
was irrelevant or only marginally important.
In trying to interpret the political behaviour of men such as
Satya Kinkar Sahana we can turn to the British parliament of
the eighteenth century for an enlightening parallel. There we
find a group of men who called themselves independent
country gentlemen, and who also drew a line between them¬
selves and the politicians of their day. Their distinguishing
characteristics, in the words of Lewis Namier “were as a rule
neither political acumen and experience nor Parliamentary
eloquence, but an independent character and station in life,
and indifference to office”.42 “What mattered to them was
not so much membership of the House [of Commons], as the
primacy in their own ‘country’ attested by their being chosen
to represent their county or some respectable borough.”43
Primacy in their own “country”—this was what really mattered
to the independent country gentlemen of twentieth-century
India as well. The society and politics of the district and the
district headquarters town were of central importance to men
like Satya Kinkar Sahana.
Of course, an unsuccessfully contested legislative election
could damage local prestige, just as it had done in eighteenth-
century England. This explains what I think we may justly
describe as an immoderate outburst from Sahana after his
defeat at the polls in January 1937.

The life of storm and stress through which [ passed during

the last few years and which was of my own seeking passed
away. At first I felt some pain at parting with it but cooler
thoughts prevailing I felt much relieved. Nov/ I am fully
convinced of the incurable fickleness of the vulgar herd,
how they are misled by false words which find a ready
response in the working of their corrupt minds. I am a
wiser man now; I know that the human mind is so cankered
with mean jealousy, puckish mischievousness and other

i2The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London,

second edition 1957), p. 6.
i3lbid., p. 5.
 176 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

grovelling and snorting faculties that friendship, gratitude

and other nobler virtues have flown from the realm of
humanity. Now I have made up my mind not to spare time
for so-called public service but to utilize every moment of
my life in improving my inner and outer self; to read, think
and write, to look closely to my own affairs and make them
paying more than they have been doing at present . . . there
is not the least intention in my mind to stand for election,
either in the near or remote future, in a constituency which
is corrupt to the very core; it is only to follow a decent
course.44

Sahana was true to his word. He never again tried for a seat
in Calcutta, turning his full attention instead to the affairs
of his district. If we care to follow him there we can learn
much about this other, neglected, level of politics.
Bankura was the westernmost district of pre-partition Bengal.
Lying on the apron of the Chota Nagpur plateau and largely
covered by Sal forest, it was tribal Santal country, avoided by
most Bengalis in the nineteenth century as too “junglee”. The
establishment of a good missionary college and the opening
of a railway to Bankura town in 1902, however, was followed
by increasing Bengali immigration. The Santals were rapidly
dispossessed of their better lands, a profitable enterprise in
which the Sahana family was active.
The Sahanas were Aguris or Ugra Kshatriyas, the dominant
cultivating caste of Burdwan district. Satya Kinkar Sahana’s
grandfather had augmented the family’s cultivating and money-
lending activities with a small transhipment and warehousing
business at Raniganj shortly after the railway from Calcutta
reached there in 1854. When the line was carried further west
into southern Bihar, his two sons extended the business to the
new railheads in Chota Nagpur. They were remarkably success¬
ful, and not long after Satya Kinkar was born in 1874 they
began investing their profits in coal and mica mines—incident¬
ally giving the lie to all that old nonsense about the unenter¬
prising Indian peasant and the entrepreneurially inept Bengali.
Satya Kinkar was given the education neither his grandfather

44Diary, 31 March 1937.

FOUR LIVES 177

nor his father could afford for themselves. He was sent

to Scotch Church College in Calcutta and to Presidency
College, where he was a contemporary of Fazlul Huq. From
there he went back to manage the family business in southern
Bihar, and he had ten years experience by the time his father
and uncle died within a few hours of each other in 1908*
SatyaKinkar continued their policy of investing a large part
of the mining profits in Bankura lands, and in 1917 he bought
a house in Bankura town. Although ultimately he had seven
zamindaris and eight houses scattered through Bihar and Bengal,
the Bankura town property remained the focus of his activities
down to his death in 1960.
With the exception of the seven-year interlude in the pro¬
vincial legislature, the pattern of Satya Kinkar’s life was
reasonably uniform throughout this 43-year period—barring
the periodic crises inevitable in raising and marrying off a
family of six sons and four daughters. His diary, which he
kept fairly faithfully, gives a picture of his daily round. Here
is the entry for 5 January 1939, when he was in his mid¬
sixties-

Got up as usual before 5. After Ex[ercises], walking and

tea received the dak [mail]. Akal read the paper to me.
Pandit J. Nehru seems to have changing very fast towards
rationalism. The letter of Mr. B.C. Chatterjee to Subhas
Bose was very interesting. Asked Kunja Behari to get a
path down to the new tank prepared for taking down the
Lister Engine. Went to the site & projected the necessary
improvement. Wrote a letter to Bholanath Mukherjee of
Sitla expressing my inability to try to influence Mr. Mallik
for his selection as a co-operative Inspector. Today the
case for fixing rent on a holding which has been recorded
in Kanchanpur was fixed. As Ramesh was not here the
necessary documents could not be filed and so adjournment
was sought but the pig-headed munsiff did not allow time
so the case had to be withdrawn with the object of filing a
new case in future.

Ramesh, mentioned here, was the third son and a lawyer. All
of Satya Kinkar’s boys were involded with the family enterprises
 178 MOSTLY' ABOUT BENGAL

and each had been given a different education to supply

the family with a variety of skills. Apart from the lawyer,
there was a mining engineer, a doctor, a chemist and a libera!
arts graduate.45 Equally as important as education were marriage
alliances—through the daughters as well as the sons—and Satya
Kinkar had established important economic and political links
in this way.
The diary extract above gives a glimpse of the local mag¬
nate’s role as a patron, refusing to intercede for a job on this
occasion, helping to protect someone’s interests on another.
With Sahana we see the circle of his clients grow with the
expansion of his economic empire and his political involve¬
ments. At first he is approached only by kinsmen and tenants;
later his aid is sought by total strangers.
There was a host of elective and appointive offices in the district
available to the man w'ho wished to extend his influence and pres¬
tige, and Sahana held many of them They included such disparate
activities as the boards of management of the Christian mis¬
sionary college, the District Agriculture Association and the
Ramakrishna Math. There was work to be done in local govern¬
ment: on the District Board and the Transport Authority, and
as an Honorary Magistrate at the District Court. There were
the positions of Commissioner of the Boy Scout Troups and
patron of the town cricket club. There were regular neighbour¬
hood pujas, where the provision of a piece of land for the
pandal, and generous monetary support for the preparation of
the murti and the hiring of a Brahmin did much to enhance
one’s standing in the locality. There were the periodic flurries
of activity in the Ugra Kshatriya caste association, especially
at census time. There were always decisions to be made in
connection with the Ekteswar Mandir, Bankura’s most ancient
Siva temple which stood on Sahana land and for which the
family had assumed traditional obligations as zamindars.
Patronage of the arts was also a prestigious activity, and, to
be fair, an enjoyable one. Close at hand was the famous
Vishnupur school of music inviting one’s support, and on a
rare and exciting occasion the great Gurudev, the Poet of

46The second son, Suresh, suffered a severe injury as a child, which

left him permanently disabled.
FOUR LIVES 179

Santiniketan, could be presuaded to come south to be feted in.

Bankura: the Sahana house still proudly displays photographs
of the day that Rabindranath took tea there. Satya Kinkar
himself wrote Bengali poetry, and published learned discourses
on society, politics and religion. He gained a high distinction
from Sanskrit College, Calcutta, and (he believed) brought
honour to his district with a monograph demonstrating that the
medieval bard, Chandidas, was a Bankura man.46
All of this was frosting on the cake. The substance was in
the business of farming, rice-milling, rent-collecting and mining.
Reading Satya Kinkar’s correspondence and diaries one soon
realizes how important to all these enterprises were the law
courts. There was scarcely a week when some case concerning
the family’s lands or mines was not being heard before a
magistrate or statutory tribunal somewhere between Ranchi and
Calcutta. And eternal vigilance was the rule, for there were many
‘pig-headed munsiffs” to be dealt with. “He asked me to be gener¬
ous”, reports one member of the family of an arbitrator in 1923,
“and I requested him to do justice.”47 Unlike Shakespeare’s
old Jew of Venice who acted on similar principles and suffered
as a consequence, Satya Kinkar made certain there was a lawyer
in the family to secure his pound of flesh.48
He also made certain that there were politicians in the family,
for wealth is not to be gained and kept in twentieth-century
India without politicking. The Sahana story offers one classic
illustration of that dictum.49 During one of the post-independ¬
ence general elections, an influential Congress politician
requested from the family a campaign contribution of Rs. 5,000
and a jeep, which request one of the sons had the temerity to
refuse. As a consequence, a short time later the family was
informed by a government department that certain of their

46Chandidas Prasanga (Calcutta, 1959)

47Bimala Kinkar Sahana to Satya Kinkar Sahana, 6 August 1923
(Sahana papers, Ananda Kutir, Bankura).
49The litigiousness of the Bengali landholder was notorious; e.g. see
R. Carstairs: The Little World of an Indian District Officer (London,
1912), pp. 85-108.
49I have not given names and dates in this account as the incident
was relatively recent and some of those involved may still be active in
public life.
 180 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

leases, due for renewal, were being revoked. At the time the
politician involved appeared in some danger of losing his state
ministerial post, and gambling on this the Sahanas tried to go
over his head with an appeal to the Union Government. This
was not a wise move. As a state government secretary tact¬
fully explained to them: “the Honourable Member is a very
sentimental person” and “he has minded a bit regarding your
approach to Delhi”. Put bluntly, he was furious. The Sahanas
were saved only by securing the intervention of an influential
relative by marriage. He persuaded the Minister to let them
keep most of their leasehold property, on condition that they
immediately contribute Rs. 10,000 in the Minister’s name to
a college, jn his constituency.50
This incident, as one may guess, did not improve Satya
Kinkar Sahana’s opinion of the Congress Party, which had
been none too good since a Congressman inflicted that humiliat¬
ing defeat on him at the 1937 elections. As he grew older he
became firmly convinced that all “politicians” were corrupt,
and that to corruption Congressmen added duplicity. The
ultimate betrayal was the partition of India, for which Sahana
could not forgive Congress to his dying day.

The award of the boundary commission was declared. To

me it seemed to be one-sided and biased. . .. Throwing that
tract [Chittagong Hill Tracts] in Pakistan is most unreason¬
able and high-handed. This should have been resisted with
violence—but Gandhi—the agent of British imperialism—-
masquerading as Indian patriot will not rest till the Hindus
are wiped out of existence and the Hindus in their sentimental
foolishness will go on licking the hand that holds the assas¬
sin’s dagger. ... I think I am out of gear in the present
world.51

50Correspondence in Sahana papers, Ananda Kutir, Bankura.

■'Diary. For fuller biographical information on Sahana see Paresh
Bijoy Sahana: Rai Bahadur Satyakinar Sahana Mahashyer Sankhipta
Jiban, (Bankura, I960); Jnanendranath Kumar: Bangsha Parichay
(Calcutta, 1932), vol. XII, pp. 77-106.
FOUR LIVES 181

File 3/40

1 have surveyed three lives, and in so doing, have committed

the historian’s common sin of talking only of the articulate, the
powerful and the wealthy. Let me try to make amends with my
last biographical sketch.
In 1947, as Fazlul Huq packed his political bag of tricks to
go east to try his luck in the new nation of Pakistan, and as
Satya Kinkar Sahana fulminated on the need for more violence
from the security of his forty-room mansion in Bankura, an
old lady was thrown out by her son onto the streets of Calcutta
to face the terrors of communal rioting. “He had been drinking
& when he is in that state abuses filthily and is cruel”, she later
recounted. “I had to try & get my prescription from my Doctor
in the Waverly Pharmacy, Dharamtala—I failed as no rickshaw
man would go there. . . . How long I’ll keep well & what’s in
my future God alone knows. I’ll walk the streets but I shall
never go to my son’s place.”52
Mrs. Frances Mills was seventy-five years old and destitute.
She continually apologized for her impoverished condition
for it had not always been thus. Her father was an Englishman,
William Knight, a lieutenant in the military, and her mother
was an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian). They had sent their daughter
to good schools in Lucknow, Allahabad, and Agra, and she had
stayed in school until her mid-teens which was more education
than most young ladies of the late nineteenth century could
hope for. In her twenties she married Arthur Mills, who follow¬
ed that most popular of Anglo-Indian avocations: railwayman.
The Mills spent most of their forty years of married life in
drab railway bungalows, like those described in the novels of
John Masters, alongside the isolated stations of the Eastern
Bengal Railway. Mr. Mills retired in 1931, having risen to
the grand salary of Rs 210 a month. He had enough with his
Provident Fund and his gratuity to buy a small house in the
hills at Kurseong, and after his death in 1937 his wife could
live for a few years on the proceeds of its sale.

52Frances Mills to A.N. Greene, Secretary, De Souza and Doucett

Charities, 12 April 1947. (All references concerning Mrs. Mill are from
her file, No. 3/40, at this charity, 3 Royd Street, Calcutta).
182 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

By 1940 everything was gone and she had to turn to her

children for help. One son was a guard on the railways, but
with little to spare as he had four children to raise. Besides,
his wife and his mother were never on good terms. The other
son was a drunkard, and, until the American Army arrived in
Calcutta in 1942, no one would consider employing him. The
only steady income for his family of five children and two
illegitimate grandchildren came from his wife who worked as
a nurse. Old Mrs. Mills was some help in minding the children,
but the discomfort and tensions for ten people crowded to¬
gether in two small rooms in central Calcutta were barely
tolerable. At times things got too bad altogether. “I have to
get nourishing food,” wrote Frances Mills in August 1945,
“here it’s starvation at times & so I am leaving. Please excuse
all trouble & thanking you for all your kindness.”53
A Calcutta charity had come to her aid with a grant of Rs 16
per month (she had been on their waiting list for four and a
half years), and her other son, now in a better-paying job in
Eastern Bengal, was able to send her occasional money-orders.
The years 1946 and 1947, with Calcutta in incessant turmoil,
were difficult for her, and with partition she lost all contact
with her son in the east. Swallowing her pride, she was forced
to seek refuge in a home for the aged run by the Little Sisters
of the Poor, and it was there that she spent the last ten years of
her life.
She died the same day as Satya Kinkar Sahana. He was
mourned by his large family, his servants and his friends, and
every major newspaper in Bengal noted his passing. She died
alone, and her only obituary was a pencilled note with which
the charity closed her file: “Died on 7-X-60, aged 88.”

“Frances Mill to A.N. Greene, 30 August 1945.

 8

Gandhi: A Twentieth-Century Anomaly?

Early one misty morning in January 1941, a bearded figure,

dressed as a Muslim, slipped away from a house on a Calcutta
back street to begin what has become an epic journey in modern
Indian history. Eduding the police and ultimately the British
military on the frontier, he made his way across North India
into Afghanistan, where he arranged with difficulty to be taken
to Moscow and on to Berlin. There he persuaded the Nazis to
provide him with the resources to raise an Indian regiment,
which he hoped would spearhead the armed liberation of his
homeland. When it appeared that the Japanese were likely to
reach India before the Germans, he made another journey, by
submarine to Southeast Asia, there to raise an Indian National
Army. His troops saw action against the British in Burma
before their leader died in an air crash in 1945.
This heroic figure was, of course, Subhas Chandra Bose, and
his life story is in many ways typical of the twentieth-century
revolutionary nationalist. Western-educated, with a university
degree, he went in his late teens to the imperial metropolis,
London, to compete successfully for a place in the ruling Indian
Civil Service. At his moment of triumph, however, he renounc¬
ed the opportunity, and returned to India to join the new
mass movement of resistance to British rule. In his twenties
he organized militant youth brigades, reaching the height of his
 184 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

popularity during the civil disobedience campaigns from 1930

to 1932. He advocated the violent overthrow of the British,
and led para-military formations in displays of opposition to
their imperialism. He was arrested, imprisoned and externed
for long periods, but from his gaol cell in exile he continued to
exhort his countrymen to rise in revolt against their oppressors.
In Bose we can see the likeness of many other twentieth-
century revolutionaries: Mao, Ho, and Sukarno in Asia;
Kenyatta in Africa; Madero and Castro in Latin America;
Venizelos, Husseini, and Grivas in the Eastern Mediterranean;
Trotsky, De Valera, Tito, and Hitler in Europe. All were
practitioners of the politics of militant confrontation, and all
earned their periods of imprisonment or exile. All shared an
ambition to mobilize sectors of their societies to effect the
overthrow of perceived imperialisms, internal or external. All
were attracted by military styles of organization and discipline,
and all had faith in the efficacy of violence.
How striking the contrast if we consider Mohandas Karam-
chand Gandhi. During that same civil disobedience campaign
of 1930 in which Subhas Bose led his young storm troopers
against the police, we find Gandhi on his Dandi salt march: a
walk of 200 miles through village India to the seacoast to make
salt as a symbolic gesture of resistance to British rule. What a
quaint figure we see in the photographs: a skinny, knobbly-kneed
little man, dressed in a loin cloth, granny glasses perched on
his nose, barefoot, setting forth with only a walking stick to assist
him on a trek which would daunt most men of sixty. Here was a
man leading a great political movement with watchcries of truth,
love, self-suffering, abstinence, and non-violence. Surely anomal¬
ous watchcries for the twentieth century with its dynamic empha¬
sis upon revolutionary uprising and violence? Perhaps Gandhi is
an anomalous figure in this century? “In an era that takes
matters of religious faith lightly,” Susanne Rudolph has written,
“it is difficult to consider a man who is suspected of saintliness.”1
Yet it is Gandhi, not Subhas Chandra Bose or the many other
Indian proponents of violence, who is best known outside, as
well as inside, India.

1Susanne Hoeber Rudolph: “The New Courage. An Essay on

Gandhi's Psychology”, World Politics, vol. XVI, no. 1, October 1963,
p. 98.
 GANDHI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANOMALY 185

Let us recap the main features of Gandhi’s life to draw out

the characteristics of his ideals and achievement. He was born
in Kathiawar, an isolated northwestern peninsula, where his
lather was a princely state official. The environment in which
he was raised was one of orthodox Hinduism, and he was
strongly influenced by the quietous principles of Vaisnavism and
Jainism. His was an educated but not, we may fairly say, an
intellectual family. He was put into that most favoured of
professions for the nineteenth-century Indian elites, the law,
and, as few Indians in that century could hope to do, he was
enabled to go to Britain in 1887 for extended legal education.
Gandhi’s first months in London were cold, lonely and un¬
comfortable (as his photographs of the period suggest: flannel
suit, starched shirt, Victorian high collar, and all). It was not
until he abandoned his legal studies and began to associate
with a vegetarian, pacifist group that he discovered some warmth
and friendship in that alien city. It was in this company that
he rubbed shoulders with such European minds as Tolstoy, and
the American, Thoreau. The mixed metaphor of shoulders and
minds is appropriate, for Gandhi does not appear to have
gained any deep understanding of these thinkers. They influenc¬
ed him, but mainly by reinforcing established beliefs. The
basis of his philosophy is to be sought within his own Indian
traditions.
In 1891, having belatedly resumed his legal studies and
passed the bar examinations, Gandhi returned to Bombay,
where he was an instant and spectacular failure as a barrister.
Rising in court to plead his first case, he found himself at a loss
for words, and he was quickly demoted to office paper work.
In 1893 his firm received a lucrative but routine request for
legal counsel from a member of the Indian community in the
Transvaal. The partners looked around for their most dispens¬
able clerk—and despatched Mr. Gandhi.
The experience in South Africa, though in origin so humdrum,
was to work a transformation in Gandhi’s life—a transform¬
ation so spectacular that it may be compared with that of Saul
on the road to Damascus. Gandhi arrived in South Africa to
be met with racial discrimination of a kind he had never experi¬
enced in India and Britain. It shook his faith in the funda¬
mental justice and goodwill of the British imperial system. For
186 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

a time he was at a loss for a course of action, but finally in

May 1894, goaded by the imminent disenfranchisement of his
compatriots in Natal, he formed the Natal Indian Congress.
The inarticulate young lawyer was gone; in his place stood
an outspoken and courageous crusader against racial injustice.
For the next 20 years, up to the outbreak of the First World
War, Gandhi worked in South Africa. In this land far from
India, step by step he fashioned his new revolutionary tech¬
nique, to which he gave the name satyagraha: “soul force,”
which he contrasted with “brute force.” His basic principle
was ahimsa: non-violence. Non-violence in thought as well as
deed, for Gandhi drew on a philosophical tradition which does
not recognize that hard distinction between thought and action
with which we are familiar in the West. Angry thoughts
injure the thinker as well as those against whom they are
directed. So Gandhi insisted that love, not hatred, must be the
guiding principle of political, as well as personal, action. One
must empathize with one’s adversary, seeking the good in him
and his cause, and trying to eradicate whatever is evil—in self
or opponent. The aim in politics, Gandhi emphasized, is to help
one’s opponent escape his error, as much as to advance one’s own
cause. The objective must be to heal social wounds, to estab¬
lish a new basis for reconciliation and positive political action
in the future; not to antagonize and polarize. “My experience,”
he wrote, “has shown me that we win justice quickest by render¬
ing justice to the other party.”2
This did not mean that injustice from others should go un¬
resisted. Indeed, Gandhi emphasized that non-violent resistance
to oppression was a duty. Urging his fellow Indians in South
Africa to united action in defense of their communal rights,
his call was: “Not to submit; to suffer.”3 Again he drew upon
the traditions of his native Gujarat in applying to politics a
technique of moral suasion used there in familial and mercantile
disputes. The method was for the aggrieved party to shame his
adversary and win sympathetic support for his cause by display
of self-abnegation, most commonly fasting. With this model

2My Experiments With Truth (Ahmedabad, second edition 1940),

p. 225.
3See W.K. Hancock: Smuts, The Sanguine Years, 1S7J-19I9
(Cambridge, 1962) p. 329.
GANDHI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANOMALY 187

in mind, Gandhi devised a succession of non-violent confron¬

tations with the South African authorities. The issues were
diverse, and time and place varied greatly, but there was a
common aim: to provide those in power with opportunities to
demonstrate the injustice of their regime by forcing them
to retaliate against limited, non-violent and symbolic acts of
protest.
Gandhi achieved a surprising number of victories, but the
long-term gains for the South African Indian community were
negligible. For this reason the real significance of this period
of Gandhi’s work must be sought in the experience it gave him:
as an organizer, tactician and publicist. His trips to India and
Britain in search of finance and support provided enduring
contacts for his later work with the Indian National Congress,
and the attention his movement attracted in the press assured
him of fame among politically-aware Indians. He left South
Africa in 1914 after a striking success against the Union
Government. His opponent of many years, the Minister of the
Interior, Jan Smuts, breathed a sigh of relief. “The saint has
left our shores,” he wrote. “I sincerely hope for ever.”4
It proved to be so.
Gandhi in India had bigger fish to fry—if one may use so
inappropriate a metaphor for a vegetarian! The Indian national¬
ist movement to which he returned, and in which he was clearly
determined to play a role, had developed rapidly in the preced¬
ing decade. If, for comparison’s sake, we use the familiar
categories of American Black nationalism, the Indian move¬
ment had developed from its late nineteenth-century NAACP
stage, of a liberal union of right-thinking men, through a period
of marches and sit-ins, to economic campaigns to “Buy Black,”
accompanied by cultural revivalism (“Black is Beautiful”), and
finally to the revolutionary call to arms: “Burn, Baby, Burn.”
As one might expect, such radical developments had split the
Indian National Congress. Growing disunity and the failure of
the Congress leaders to win mass support, had convinced many
nationalists of the need for a structural reorganization of their
movement.
Into this situation Gandhi came with striking advantages. He

4/6A/., p. 345.
188 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

had an established public reputation, but, unlike other promin¬

ent figures, he was free of factional identification. Moreover,
he was an experienced organizer, with his own patented tech¬
nique of agitational politics. Circumspect as ever, he bided his
time. He spent the war years extending his network of
political contacts, but steadfastly resisted the temptation to be
drawn into their factional squabbles. He chose his own
distinctive point of entry into the Indian political arena, initiat¬
ing a peasant satyagraha against the British indigo planters of
northern Bihar in 1918. The indigo industry he attacked was
uneconomic, and had been maintained only by blatant exploita¬
tion of the peasant cultivators. His satyagraha was a rapid and
complete success, and its publicity precipitated him into the
front rank of nationalist leaders.
For Gandhi it was a dictum of politics that an unjust regime
is bound to enlarge the area of conflict by its over-reactions
to protest. The months following his Bihar movement seemed
to prove him right. Disturbed by industrial and peasant unrest,
and with a weather-eye on Bolshevik successes in Russia, the
Government of India insisted upon arming itself with legislation
to extend its war-time powers of summary action against sus¬
pected conspirators. Gandhi responded with a call to the
Congress to organize nation-wide hartals (general strikes).
April 1919 brought mass protests in many cities of northern
and western India, and, when violence erupted in the Panjab,
a jittery British administration retaliated brutally. In the bitter
aftermath, Gandhi was able to persuade the Congress to
accept his blueprint for reorganization, and his leadership of a
mass campaign of non-cooperation.
It is instructive to observe the elements Gandhi emphasized
in the programme he advanced, for it will give some measure
of the principles which were to guide his three decades of
political work in India. In the first place he proposed that all
participation in the activities and institutions of British Indian
government should cease, and that Congressmen should devote
themselves to the construction of national institutions: “a
government of one’s own within the dead shell of the foreign
government.”5 Resistance, non-violent and symbolic, might be

5C.F. Andrews paraphrasing Gandhi. Letter to Rathindranath

GANDHI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANOMALY 189

offered to particular acts of British oppression, but the really

important work was in national reconstruction. For the nation
as for the individual, Gandhi taught, salvation could be gained
only by internal reformation. Society had to be rid of its evils,
especially those of dissension and human exploitation. As a
first step he called for reconciliation between religious com¬
munities, and he took up the Khilafat issue as a means of
cementing Hindu-Muslim unity. He also demanded that caste
barriers be broken down and that the untouchables be accepted
into the body of Hinduism. Congressmen of all castes should
work with the Harijans (the “Children of God,” as Gandhi
called them) to help them rise from their degradation.
Similarly, there had to be an end to economic oppression.
Gandhi was adamant that self-government for India would be a
travesty if the mass of the people were not freed from the
exploitation of capitalists, landholders, and money-lenders. The
nationalist movement had to be the people’s movement, to
benefit the mass of the people. He insisted that Congress demon¬
strate its concern for the welfare of the Indian poor by adopt¬
ing a programme of economic rehabilitation. Congressmen
should leave their urban professions and go into the villages
to start cottage industry. The local manufacture of cotton
cloth should be revived. The spinning wheel should become
the symbol of India’s new life, and the wearing of khadi
(homespun) a gesture of the nation’s rejection of imperialism.
In its initial states in the early months of 1921, the first non¬
cooperation movement was a remarkable success. The un¬
precedented numbers participating in the agitation—Muslims
as well as Hindus—raised serious alarm among British officials.
To the perplexity of many of his colleagues in the Congress
hierarchy, however, Gandhi seemed to value opportunities for
confrontation with the Government less than those for popular
political education and social reform. His insistense on contin¬
ually shifting the focus of the movement, and his prohibition
of what to others seemed logical areas of agitation, e.g., indus¬
trial disturbances, frustrated even some of his closest followers.
In part these shifts reflected his mature judgement of the need

Tagore, 6 September [1920], Andrews manuscripts, Rabindia Sadana,.

Visva-Bharati.
190 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

to keep the British off-balance; in part they were the product

of a determination to maintain his personal domination of the
movement; but, most of all, they reflected his deep concern to
preserve non-violence. It was the conviction that he had failed
to do this that led to his sudden call in February 1922 for an
end to the agitation.
Gandhi initiated two other great campaigns and a host of
minor actions in the years before independence. Always he put
major emphas s on ethical considerations, insisting doggedly
that he alone must be their arbiter. Always he was unpredict¬
able in his tactical decisions, and in his timing of the final
withdrawal. As a consequence, there were some who became
totally exasperated with his leadership—amongst the most out¬
spoken being Subhas Chandra Bose. We need not follow
Gandhi step by step through these years, but we must surely
ask: how could he retain his following despite such apparently
eccentric political behaviour? The question is the more intrigu¬
ing when we realize that on a number of occasions he withdrew
from active politics for five or more years at a time, and yet
was still able to emerge at his chosen moment to resume the
leadership of the national movement.
One answer is that Gandhi was a phenomenal scribbler, a
fact readily verified by a count of the number of volumes of his
khadi-bound collected works, now threatening to engulf all but
the largest libraries. His polemical writings filled his own news¬
paper and the columns of many others, year in and year out.
He produced books on politics, religion, social organization,
and his owm life. During his great campaigns, his scribbled
battle orders poured fiom every halting place; and from his
ashram during his years of retreat the flow of advice, praise,
cajolery, and (forgive the heresy) moralizing never ebbed.
Gandhi knew the value of a good communications system, and
he spared neither himself nor his assistants in his efforts to
keep in touch.
He also knew the value of good lieutenants. It is paradoxical
that while Gandhi was not particularly responsive to criticism
(being too assured of the quality of his own judgment), he was
willing to tolerate strong differences of opinion amongst his
associates. Indeed it should be put more positively: he worked
hard (often through painfully devised compromises) to prevent
GANDHI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANOMALY 191

disagreements over ideology or strategy from driving able men

and women out of the Congress. As a consequence he retained
the loyalty of a remarkable number of talented and forceful
workers.
As these two points suggest, Gandhi was an organizer par
excellence. We should not be misled by the sainthood conferred
upon him by popular mythology, into thinking of him as some
impractical, dreamy visionary. This was the man who took the
ramshackle Indian National Congress of the second decade of
the century, and rebuilt it as an effective nationwide organiza¬
tion, extending from a full-time working central executive,
link-by-link to representative committees in virtually every
district of British India. At the high points of participation
during the civil disobedience campaigns, the formal organiza¬
tion reached even to the villages. Though periodically weakened
by the removal to prison of its office-bearers, it survived to
provide independent India with a nationwide institution parallel
to, and reinforcing, the governmental structure.
Another of Gandhi’s personal attributes—one which he un¬
doubtedly shared with other great politicians—was extraordinary
physical and mental stamina. The seemingly frail old man
could outwalk, outsit and outtalk others half his age. We have
amusing accounts from the second Round Table Conference in
London of British Cabinet Ministers wilting perceptibly as
Mr. Gandhi, calmly and quietly, talked on into the small hours
of the morning. His slow, tireless methods drove foes, and
sometimes friends as well, to distraction.
Lastly, Gandhi had what we can only describe as an amazing
mass appeal. He was known to, and revered by, millions in
urban and rural India like no other figure in historic times.
Wherever he went the news of his coming spread far beyond the
reach of the mass media. How could this be? The easy thing
to say is: because of his charisma. But that is no answer;
merely a rephrasing of the statement about his mass appeal.
Gandhi was a master of symbolism, and here we may have a
key. To say he was “a master of symbolism” is to make him
sound more manipulative than I would intend. Rather, he had
a keen sense of the political, social and ethical fitness of a
variety of symbols and symbolic acts.
Let us take some examples: The Dandi salt march of 1930,
192 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL,

already mentioned, was one of his most brilliant, yet simple,,

symbolic successes. All humans need salt, and in many places in
India salt can be produced with the simplest equipment, or even
scraped up from dried pools or marshes. The British Indian
Government, however, levied a tax on salt and prohibited its
unlicensed production. Obviously an attack on this restriction
would be universally popular, and would serve as an indictment
of a regime that taxed the basic needs of its pitifully poor
colonial population. Brilliant in conception; equally brilliant in
execution: a long march through village India, gathering
thousands of supporters, drawing the attention of the world
press to the moment by the sea when the imperial policemen
would be forced to arrest India’s most revered leader, and un¬
manageable numbers of his adherents, simply for lighting a fire
and heating a pan of salt water.
Gandhi’s choice of the spinning wheel and khadi to represent
the revitalized Congress, was a similar attempt to find symbols
that would have emotive appeal across the many levels of Indian
society. To the urban professional classes, it was a call for a
return to a more pure and traditional way of life. Discarding
imported cloth offered them a way to make a visible sacrifice for
the cause, while striking a blow at British economic domination.
It also offered them an opportunity (not welcomed by all) for
a symbolic union with the masses by donning common garb.
For the peasantry, the spinning wheel was among the most
sophisticated of their familiar instruments of production, and
one which had frequently provided a marketable product to
supply an income above their minimum needs. For generations
past the sale of homespun had brought them a few good times
and good things, but all too often of late their spinning wheels
had laid disused, unable to compete with factory-manufactured
goods. In Gandhi’s symbols they saw the promise of a restora¬
tion of a more just order.
Gandhi himself was a living symbol. His life-style expressed
a traditionalist philosophy. To many he appeared as the
humble ascetic, the pure man of the soil, fearless of his environ¬
ment because his own physical survival meant little to him.
Confident and courageous, yet devoid of all defensiveness, even
the defensiveness of blustering arrogance. This idealized
stereotype owed much to the Indian tradition of the ascetic
GANDHI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANOMALY 193

leader, a tradition in which Gandhi himself believed implicitly.

He was at pains to project the image of the brahmachari
(celibate). Although his rejection of worldly comforts was some¬
times ostentatious (a puckish disciple is credited with the
comment: “You have no idea how much it costs to keep
Mahatmaji in the style of poverty to which he has become
accustomed”6), there can be no question that he was thoroughly
sincere in his conviction that strength came through a renuncia¬
tion of sensual indulgence. He accepted traditional Indian
theories of physiology and psychology which hold that the
bodily essences, giving physical, mental and moral strength, are
dissipated through such outpourings as sex and anger, but
increased by pure foods, particularly vegetables and milk pro¬
ducts, and through disciplined meditation. Gandhi shared this
belief with the vast majority of his fellow Hindus. They saw
that he was a disciplined brahmachari, and they had no difficulty
in understanding the source of his superior stamina and moral
virtue.
He earned for himself the title, Mahatma: a great soul. It is
a title he disclaimed, but significant nonetheless, for it suggests
a link with an Indian tradition of religious leadership which has
been disregarded in measuring Gandhi’s impact on twentieth-
century India. This is the tradition of the religious ascetic
combining spiritual instruction for a peasant community, with
the leadership of that community in rebellion against its oppres¬
sors:' against (in Eric Hobsbawm's words) the “special form of
brigand,”7 the Government, and against the lesser, but regret¬
tably more familiar brigands: tax collectors, policemen, land¬
lords, and money-lenders. Many Hindu folk tales and many of
the most popular epics concern such rebel gurus, leading the
fight against injustice. In more recent times, under Muslim
rule and in the nineteenth century, there are many historically
recorded cases of religious teachers, sufis and bhaktas partic¬
ularly, providing leadership for local revolt. Gandhi could
easily be understood by the peasant community as a great

6Attributed to Sarojini Naidu. To my acute embarrassment, I have

been unable to find the reference to this quip.)
7Eric Hobsbawm: Primitive Revels. Studies in Archaic Forms of
Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester,
1959), p. 36.
 194 MOSTLY AEOUT BENGAL

leader, a mahatma, in this tradition of protest.

As Eric Wolf has observed: ‘'Simplified movements of pro¬
test among a peasantry frequently center upon the myth of a
social order more just and egalitarian than the hierarchical
present.”8 Gandhi, by attacking the hierarchical present, by
symbolizing a resistance to the economic oppressions worked by
instrusive modern technology and its accompanying innovations
in the organization of labour, by using the language and symbol¬
ism of the popular Hindu tradition, mobilized rural mass India
in a way that would never have been possible had independence
from Britain been the sum total of the Indian nationalist
movement. It was his genius to have seen the need, and to
have provided the means, to link together the urges of India’s
peasant masses with the struggle to expel the foreigner.
Here we touch the tragic core of Gandhi's life. He used
symbolism brilliantly. He was a master of emotive religious
imagery and the historical myths associated with his religion.
But in a multi-religious and multi-cultural society, such an
emphasis on one tradition, even if it is an unconscious empha¬
sis expressed through a life-style, must inevitably give offense
to some groups. We cannot be surprised, given the structure
of Indian thought in the early twentieth century, that attempts
at mass mobilization would involve the use of Hindu symbols,
but equally we must expect the alienation of non-Hindu com¬
munities, most notably the Muslims, a quarter of all Indians
before 1947. The Muslims felt increasingly threatened by
Indian nationalism, and the Mahatma—for all his non-violence
—was not a reassuring figure. Gandhi devoted his last ten years
to a struggle to heal the wounds opened between Islam and
Hinduism in the mass political movements of the century. It
was tragic irony that he should be assassinated in 1948 by a
Hindu nationalist who blamed him for the concessions to the
Muslims that made possible Pakistan.
Let us return to the original question: was Gandhi a
twentieth-century anomaly? Certainly he was out of step with
much else in the twentieth century, but he was intentionally so.
It was not that he was unaware of what was occurring around
him. He emphasized “soul force” as a counter to what he saw

8Eric R. Wolf: Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, 1966), p. 106.

GANDHI: A TWENTIETH-CENTURY ANOMALY 195

as the omnipresent, twentieth-century brute force. He empha¬

sized non-violence for a society he believed to be far too violent.
He was not saying, as many have mistakenly suggested, that
non-violence was the Indian tradition. Rather, he lamented that
India had many violent traditions, and warned his contempora¬
ries not to let those traditions dominate. He charged them to
take the most noble of their traditions—non-violence—and work
to ensure its dominance of their national life.
This invites the retort that he had little success: India, after
Gandhi, remains a violent place. Similarly, many will question
the general effectiveness of non-violence as an agitational
strategy, and they can cite numerous instances of its failure. It
would be foolish to suggest that non-violent movements are
always victorious, but that claim could scarcely be made for
violent struggles either. Perhaps, if we could draw up a score
sheet, we would find that failure was no more frequent in non¬
violent agitations, and I suspect we would discover that in the
former, means less often distorted ends.
What Gandhi contributed with satyagraha was an alternative
model of revolutionary action. He extended the range of polit¬
ical options available to the twentieth-century activist. This was
no mean achievement.
Perhaps Gandhi was an anomaly in another way: as a tradi¬
tionalist leader in a modern world? Not so, I would argue. If
we properly understand our twentieth-century world we shall
expect to find traditionalist leaders all about us. Such under¬
standing, however, has been made difficult by the false dicho¬
tomy many social scientists (and journalists in their wake) have
drawn between tradition and modernity. Modernization, we
have been told, implies moving away from the traditional. On
the contrary, I would argue that tradition is not something
dispensed with as one becomes modern. Tradition is the cement
that binds society together. If it is hard and inflexible it may
prevent change, or change may crack the cement and shatter
the society. This has happened, but rarely. Usually the cement
is flexible, for tradition is a malleable commodity. In the hands
of traditionalist leaders it can be bent and reshaped in adapting
the society to modern demands. Insight comes from under¬
standing and interpreting the continuity of tradition: the
strengths or weaknesses of diverse traditions for various social
 196 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

and political purposes. Because of our acceptance of the false

dichotomy between tradition and modernity, we have equated
modernization with change, and neglected the equally valid
equation between tradition and change. We have been taught
to regard traditionalist leaders as reactionaries, when in fact
many, like Gandhi, have been vigorous proponents of change.
Frequently they have been the most effective “modernizers,”
for they have understood the importance of presenting change
in comprehendable, i.e. traditional, forms.
There is a final point to be made about Gandhi’s relevance
to the twentieth century. He recognized the critical need to
deal with the problems of the peasantry—still a majority of
the world’s population, though so often treated as an anachro¬
nistic survival. We have already pointed to his attempts to
evolve an economic programme for the Indian nationalist
movement that would relieve the economic hardships and social
dislocations inflicted on peasant communities by industrializa¬
tion. Through his criticism of urban elitism in the Congress,
and, more importantly, through his own labours in rural re¬
construction, he attacked the dysfunctional and debilitating
status inferiority imposed upon the cultivator by the cult of
urban civilization. In his reverence for the tradition of the
village panchayet (council of elders), and in his utopian hopes
for the ultimate withering away of the central state structure,
he faithfully reflected the peasantry’s hostility to that “cold
monster,” the state,9 whose baffling-complexity grew with every
advance in communications technology. In his insistence that
the Congress not become the inheritor of the institutions of
British administration, he was trying to prevent in India what
has happened almost everywhere else in the ex-colonial world:
the transfer of the power to exploit the peasantry from an
urban-centered imperialist regime, to an urban-centered nation¬
alist regime. Far from being an anomaly in his twentieth-century
world, Gandhi was wrestling (however unsuccessfully) with a
crucial problem of that world: the construction of an economic
and political order in which the peasantry could have a full role.

9Eric R. Wolf: Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York,

1969), p. 294.
 9

The Social and Institutional Bases of

Politics in Bengal, 1906-1947*

The revolution in Bangladesh must have revealed to non¬

specialists what has always been evident to the specialist in
Bengal studies: that our knowledge of the twentieth-century
political history of this major world region is woefully inade¬
quate. No detailed narrative of the Indian nationalist move¬
ment in the old undivided British province is available, and the
development of Muslim politics has been even more thoroughly
neglected. One turns hopefully from English to Bengali language
sources, but there, apart from some interesting memoirs and
less reliable biographies, the situation is no better.
It is this state of neglect which has encouraged me to con¬
sider the following questions: What political institutions existed
in undivided Bengal? How did those institutions change through
the forty years up to independence? And what do the changes
tell us about the shifting social bases of politics?
One great merit of institutional analysis is that it permits us
to say something reasonably exact about the extent of political
participation and the nature of leadership. The analysis of
membership and executive committee lists, if combined with

*Note: Regarding this as an interpretive essay, 1 have taken the

liberty or excluding references, except in the one case of a direct quote.
198 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

painstaking biographical compilations, is certainly less slippery

ground for generalization than the claims of politicians about
their following and influence, all too frequently relied upon
by historians. Similarly, an examination of the stated purposes
of institutions and their practical achievemer ts is a salutary
test of political rhetoric.

Chronology

To provide a chronological framework for the discussion,'and

also to provoke thought about the major political movements
of the half century, I shall first divide Bengali politics into
chronological phases. I assume there would be general agree¬
ment in reckoning 1971 and 1947 as milestones in the region’s
history. Most historians would also add 1905 but, as the title
of this essay indicates, I reject that date in favor of 1906.
Opposition to the partition of Bengal had begun as soon as the
proposal was announced in 1903, but the agitation followed the
pattern of “polite” protest characteristic of the late nineteenth-
century Congress. It was 1906 that brought redical departures:
the mobilization of the Congress volunteer brigades; a militant
campaign of economic boycott and Swadeshi; and the first
spectacular strikes by the terrorist samiti. The year also saw
serious communal rioting and the formation of the All-India
Muslim League at Dacca. Here were many of the elements that
characterize twentieth-century Bengali politics.
I select 1918 as the beginning of the next period, again
passing by (this time with less assurance) a commonly accepted
milestone—provincial reunification in 1912. The moderates
lost control of the Bengal Congress in 1918, and with the rising
star, C.R. Das, in the vanguard, the new leadership began the
construction of a genuine party machine to give Congress the
capability of engaging in mass politics. This strategy involved
the extension of recruitment and organization to the district
towns, in itself a major reorientation. The revitalized party
attracted even the terrorists, and for a time there was a lull in
revolutionary violence. Muslim politicians also were rudely
confronted W'ith the problems of mass political participation in
1918 when the frustrations of their coreligionists in Calcutta
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 199

resulted in fierce rioting. This outburst precipitated the forma¬

tion of new communal organizations, most notably the Khilafat
Committees, and influenced their organizational efforts among
industrial labour.
Eight years later Calcutta suffered even more serious com¬
munal rioting, which marked another turning point in the
province's political history. Congress had splintered after Das’
tragically early death in 1925, and the Hindu-Muslim Pact
which he had laboriously negotiated was repudiated by his
successors. The slide towards Hindu communalism, accom¬
panied by a reactivation of the terrorist samiti, was matched
on the Muslim side with an open advocacy of separatism. A
vigorous attempt was made to organize the Muslim voters behind
communalist candidates in an effort to gain control of all elec¬
tive institutions. This effort was sustained into the 1930s, and
was largely successful.
The appointment of A K. Fazlul Huq, Krishak Praja Party
leader, as chief minister of Bengal in 1937 opened the next
phase. Four million additional peasants had been enfranchised
in 1935, and many and varied were the politicians who stood
forth claiming to speak in the name of the tenantry. Among
them were the new converts to Marxism, recently graduated
from British prisons. Huq held the premiership for six years,
and his succession of ministries produced an impressive body
of rural economic and social reform legislation.
Huq fell in 1943, M.A. Jinnah claiming that his defeat was
a triumph for the ideals of the Muslim Feague, by then com¬
mitted to the achievement of Pakistan. From 1943 to 1947,
the final phase, the Feague held office in Bengal, and the pros¬
pect of the incorporation of all or part of the province within
Pakistan was the overriding political issue.

The Nineteenth-Century Legacy

For each of these five periods, let us examine the institutional

framework of politics. In doing so we shall be well advised to
place the broadest possible construction on the term political
institution. Many institutions which are nominally economic,
social, or religious are used for political ends, and we shall
limit our understanding of the political process if we do not
200 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

take them into account. Here, however, I exclude the political

role of government administrative institutions and, at the oppo¬
site pole, the political role of the family. Almost all that lies
between may be termed voluntary association.
At the opening of the twentieth century Bengal already had
an extensive network of political institutions—to the annoyance
of the British imperial administrators who regarded this situa¬
tion as an unhealthy characteristic of the province. The British
themselves had been responsible for introducing some of the
institutions, but to their displeasure they had been progressively
taken over by Bengalis to serve indigenous purposes. The
Bengal Legislative Council, almost forty years old by the turn
of the century, remained a small consultative body under tight
British control. This was less true of the Calcutta Municipal
Corporation and the district and local boards of the other
municipalities. Election or appointment to these bodies was
prestigious, and they had sufficient local power to make mem¬
bership attractive to landholders and lawyers, the two occupa¬
tional groups then most active in Bengali politics.
For this reason, the landholders and bar associations to be
found in most district towns and in the capital had a lively polit¬
ical involvement. Coordination of their activities,- though only
intermittently attempted, was supplied from Calcutta in the
former case by the aristocratic and influential British Indian
Association and in the latter by the High Court Bar Library
Club.
In Calcutta there were also chambers of commerce to repre¬
sent the interests of bankers and merchants, plantation,
colliery, mill, and factory owners. These chambers were organ¬
ized on communal lines, with separate British, Marwari,
Muslim, and Bengali Hindu organizations. In the mofussil,
however, almost all prominent bankers and merchants
(Marwari, Muslim, and Bengali Hindu) also held land; so we
find the landholders associations representing their interests
locally.
Lawyers and landholders were pi ominent on the executive
committees of the district and people’s associations, but here
were also to be found college professors, school-teachers, journ¬
alists, and government officials. A few of these organizations
were active in the district headquarters towns, but most were
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 201

based in Calcutta, where the prominent professional and com¬

mercial men had gone to further their careers and where the
most effective lobbying for district interests could be done.
Functioning as their central organization, in a manner parallel
to that of the British Indian Association and the Bar Library
Club, was the Indian Association of Bow Bazar.
What we do not find at the beginning of this century is a
Congress organization. Many members of the associations
described called themselves congressmen; most members of the
Indian Association were so identified. But the institutional acti¬
vities of Congress were limited to the annual national conven¬
tion and the annual provincial conference, organized jointly by
the Indian Association executive and the district association of
the host district. The Bengal Provincial Congress Committee,
though in existence on paper, was in effect a subcommittee of
the Indian Association.
One of the most prevalent distortions in historical writing
on modern India is the equation of nationalism with politics,
and it bears repeating that in the early twentieth century there
was much politics to which nationalism was irrelevant or only
marginally important. One obvious area of this kind in Bengal
was educational politics. At every level, from the senate of
Calcutta University to the school boards of subdivisional
towns, the most prominent local men were engaged in volun¬
tary educational administration, which had assumed extra¬
ordinary importance for Bengalis as one of the few avenues of
constructive public endeavour open to them in their circumscri¬
bed colonial society.
This was one field in which the Muslims were very active.
Apart from the affairs of their own madrassah and maktab,
they were taking an increasing interest by 1900 in general edu¬
cational politics, with associations at the provincial and national
levels (the Central National Mahommedan Association being
the most renowned) lobbying for remedial help for the commu¬
nity on the ground of educational backwardness. The District
Islamia Anjumans, parallel bodies to the Hindu-run district
and people’s Associations, also gave educational affairs priority.
To complete this picture we should take note of the college
students’ associations, themselves arenas for lively political
contests and a fertile recruiting ground for nationalists. Less
202 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

directly involved with politics, but important as centers for

educated gathering and discussion, were the private libraries,
''reading rooms, and cultural societies (Sahitya Parishad, Saras-
wat Sabha, and Sanskriti Samaj) found in many towns. As one
may guess from their Bengali titles, these were primarily
Hindu societies, concerned with the Hindu cultural heritage of
particular localities. It is indicative of how much less lively
was the cultural life of Bengal’s Muslims that they had few
such societies outside Calcutta and many of those were patron¬
ized by the Urdu, rather than the Bengali-speaking, com¬
munity.
At this point a word of caution is necessary: institutional
development had not proceeded evenly throughout the pro¬
vince. Calcutta, of course, was in a category by itself, but
between the districts there was also a marked variation in the
level of institutionalization. In Midnapore and Hooghly, for
instance, we find greater activity than in neighbouring Bankura,
Burdwan, and Birbhum. Dacca and Chittagong had many
more political institutions than did the districts which lay
between. We can guess at some of the reasons for these dispa¬
rities, but the very fact that we are still speculating about such
fundamental features of Bengal’s political system is a mark of
how limited is our knowledge.

Phase One: 1906-1918

Lord Curzon’s partition gave an extraordinary boost to politics

in Bengal, one indicator being an immediate jump in news¬
paper circulation. In the latter half of the nineteenth century
Calcutta had been justly famous for its lively journalism, but we
must be careful in retrospect not to exaggerate the size of the
profession or its influence. It was only from 1906 onward that
readership expanded sufficiently to support a sizeable number
of professional journalists, and the newspaper and periodical
offices became the focal points of important political groupings.
Dacca, capital of the short-lived Province of Eastern Bengal
and Assam, was now able to sustain a daily paper; other
mofussil towns intermittently produced weeklies. These were
most often a sideline of small commercial presses, and their
publishers could afford to dabble in nationalist politics only
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 203

when they had financial backing from local congressmen to

compensate for the inevitable loss of their staple government
adveristing. This was one of the small, but effective, ways in
which the British discriminated against the Hindu nationalists.
Expressions of support for Muslim political positions did not
bring similar punitive action.
The British had good reason to be disturbed by institutional
developments in Bengal in 1906 and the years immediately
following. Inspired by Garibaldi's Red Shirts, the younger,
militant congressmen organized volunteer brigades to lead the
boycott of stores selling imported cloth and to hawk Swadeshi
goods produced by the experimental economic self-help societies
founded since the turn of the century. This ideal of economic
self-reliance was paralleled by the ideal of national education,
which inspired the establishment of schools and colleges inde¬
pendent of the British-dominated Calcutta University and state
systems. The curricula of the new institutions combined an
emphasis on the glorious cultural heritage of Hindustan with a
stress on technical and physical education. As in the establish¬
ment of sports clubs and gymnasiums at this time, no great
effort was made to conceal the intended connection between
physical training and the preparation for a disciplined struggle
against the imperialists.
More clandestine were the revolutionary samiti, which attra¬
cted recruits from the college generation with a heady doctrine
of political self-sacrifice as service to Ma Kali, the avenger.
Elaborate rites of initiation bound the members with vows of
loyalty, secrecy, and celibacy, and, for the most trusted, there
was training with revolvers and bombs in preparation for
attacks upon British officials. Calcutta and the peri-urban
areas to the north along the Hooghly, Dacca and Barisal, were
the initial centers of organization. But as the British reinforced
their intelligence network and hit back with arbitrary arrest
and deportation, the terrorists were forced to scatter across
the province, spreading the legend of revolutionary violence
which has become so important a part of Bengal’s political
tradition.
Less spectacular but also working to establish the link
between religious tradition and nationalism were the jatra (folk
theater) and loksangit (folk song) parties, which now went
204 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

out from the urban centers to spread the message of resistance

and national regeneration to a wider audience. Gurudev
Rabindranath Tagore supplied songs and dramas for their
repertoire.
The period also saw new religious institutions spreading into
the mofussil from Calcutta. Throughout much of the nine¬
teenth century, the metropolis, and one or two of the larger
towns, had witnessed a lively conflict between reform groups
like the Brahmo Samaj and their traditionalist opponents, but
in rural Bengal religious organization had retained its traditional
familial form. Vivekananda’s Ramakrishna Mission, whose
math, ashrams, schools, hostels, libraries and dispensaries were
soon to be found all over Bengal and beyond, supplied anew
model—and, incidentally, anew arena for politics.
The social service ideal which inspired the mission’s work
also inspired a host of smaller societies, many of them secular.
To meet the recurrent disasters of famine, flood, cyclone, and
epidemic to which Bengal is tragically prone, these organiza¬
tions raised funds, assembled relief supplies, and ministered to
the needs of the suffering. Many a political reputation was
made through hard work and effective organization during
emergency relief operations.
The initiatives in nationalist politics produced a flurry of
counteraction among the Bengali Muslims, and this activity
was sustained by the succession of crises which beset the com¬
munity through the subsequent decade. The foundation of the
All-India and Bengal Presidency Muslim leagues following the
December 1906 conference in Dacca was an event of major
importance, but surprisingly this was the only significant
Muslim institutional innovation in this period.

Phase Two: 1918-1926

Engaged in the winter of 1917-1918 in a struggle to wrest

control of the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (BPCC)
from the Indian Association, C.R. Das and his fellow extremists
organized an All-Bengal Political Conference in Calcutta to
which they brought more than a hundred rural delegates.
Acting with their approval, they seized control of the BPCC
 SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 205

and immediately reconstituted it to provide direct representation

for district associations.
This was the beginning of the construction of a Congress
machine in Bengal, the organizational effort reaching its high
point during the non-cooperation movement in 1921. By that
time the BPCC had its own office in Calcutta, from which Das’
staff of full-time workers directed the affairs of the four divisions
into which the metropolitan area had been divided and kept in
regular communication with the Congress committees now
active in each district. A Congress News Service dispensed party
propaganda and the Congress volunteers, more numerous and
more formally organized than in the partition period, were at
work throughout the province collecting for the Swaraj Fund,
the party purse.
Women made their first appearance in any numbers in
political agitation, and the new mahila samiti began educational
and social welfare work in the towns. The national schools and
colleges, most of which had expired in the years since the
partition agitation, were revived to encourage a boycott of
government educational institutions, and in some places Congress
arbitration boards were offered to mediate disputes withdrawn
from the law courts. Although this effort at parallel government
could not be sustained for more than a few months, it did set a
pattern which was repeated with increasing success in each of
the other civil disobedience campaigns up to—and beyond—
independence.
To carry Congress’ influence outside the towns, the Gandhians
built up rural ashrams where the lessons of village reconstruc¬
tion and cottage industry were patiently taught through the
example of personal labour. In all these activities Muslims as
well as Hindus were involved, for this period from 1918 to 1925
was the high point in Muslim involvement in Indian nationalist
politics in Bengal.
In addition the Muslim politicians had their Khilafat com¬
mittees, the product of the discontent—international and local—
accompanving the end of World War I. These committees,
with a central headquarters in Calcutta and branches in every
district town, paralleled the Congress organization, with which
they were encouraged (unsuccessfully) to merge. The khilafatists
also showed vigour in taking over the District Islamia Anjumans,.
206 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

and with the support of many mullahs they had a reliable

communications network among their coreligionists.
It was they who took the initiative, quickly followed by the
Congress, in trade union organization. Agitation among trans¬
port workers, miners, mill labourers, and, later, tea garden
coolies produced a rash of strikes in the immediate postwar
years, but the organization was weak, with scarcely any strike
funds available to it, and the workers involved suffered severely.
It took another twenty years of organ zation before the trade
union movement in Bengal became a powerful force.
These efforts were obviously directed toward agitational
recruitment. There were other organizational initiatives inspired
by the enfranchisement in 1921 of almost a million new voters
among the urban lower middle class and the prosperous culti¬
vators. We find prominent and aspiring politicians busy with
the formation of associations of teachers, mukhtar, non-gazet-
teered government officers, and joafdar. The electoral stakes
were now worth playing for. The Provincial Legislative Council
had been given control over some government departments;
power in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation was transferred
by mid-decade from official nominees to the elected members;
and an expanded system of local boards was taking over functions
of the district and subdivisional officers. Even at the height of
their success in 1921, the non-cooperators were uncomfortably
aware of the risks involved in leaving these institutions to their
opponents, and in 1923 they returned to the hustings.
Another major institutional development of the years between
1915 and 1925 must be noted: the caste associations. Some
caste sabha in Bengal dated, from much earlier, but it was in
this period that many more of the middle or lower castes were
organizing. The new associations appear to have had little
connection with the traditional caste panchayet, a few of which
still survived in Bengal to settle marriage and other intra-caste
disputes. The normal pattern of the new associations was for
a handful of educated and professionally employed members
residing in a district town or, more frequently, Calcutta to form
a committee. Through printed circulars and at meetings called
in the district town most conveniently located for the majority
of the caste members, they explained the objectives of the
proposed association.
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 207

Typically these aims included the improvement of the caste’s

ritual practices to conform with the higher status (Kshatriya,
Vaisya, or clean Sudra, whichever it might be) to which the
caste was “unquestionably” entitled. Stress was laid upon
ensuring that this “correct” status, and a caste name appro¬
priate to it, be recorded at the decennial census. In some cases
the abolition of endogarnous subgroups within the caste was
urged; in others, particularly where there was marked occupa¬
tional differentiation between the divisions, a complete split was
advocated. In view of the new powers vested in local boards
and the legislature, attention was drawn to the opportunities
open to the caste if its members gave solid support to those
of their fellows who w'ere candidates for elective office. Caste
members were urged to subscribe to the association to support
the educational campaign needed to effect these reforms and
to enable the association to aid indigent caste members. When
the appeals were successful, the associations usually began the
publication of caste journals, but few were sustained for any
length of time.

Phase Three: 1926-1937

Criticism of the privileges and power of high-caste men in the

literature of some of the caste associations was one of a number
of disturbing developments which led to the formation of the
Bengal Hindu Sabha in 1923. The prime movers were Brahmins,
and their stated purpose was to resist the growing disunity
among Hindus, which, they asserted, endangered Hindu social
order and political power. From 1926 onward the Bengal Hindu
Sabha had many battles to fight.
Congress’ repudiation of C.R. Das’ Hindu-Muslim Pact^
and the subsequent brutal communal rioting in mid-1926, con¬
vinced many Bengali Muslims that they should follow those
leaders who were urging an end to all alliances with the Hindu
nationalists. With the approval of the provincial government,
and with the assistance of British officials in some districts,
there was a successful consolidation of the local Muslim
associations to ensure more efficient electoral management.
This consolidation resulted in the return of many separatist
candidates to the Bengal Legislative Council in the December
 208 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

1926 elections; it also brought a large inciease in Muslim repre¬

sentation on the local boards when those elections were held
in the following year. In the early 1930s more and more seats-
were captured, and inroads were made on the Hindu-controlled
college and school boards.
In rural areas there was now evidence of growing collabora¬
tion between the Muslim and low-caste Hindu peasantry, to the
detriment of the interests of the higher landed classes. The
Krishak Samitis, which had struggled ineffectually to organize
the peasantry since their foundation after World War I, now
began to attract a much wider following as the world depression
throttled Bengal’s economy. They were given central leadership
and spokesmen in the legislature when Fazlul Haq formed the
Krishak Praja Party in July 1929. At the same time Depressed
Classes (Scheduled Caste, as they later came to be called)
Associations were formed to unite low-caste sabha in a lobby
against the high-caste Hindus in the constitutional debates which,
opened with the appointment of the Simon Commission.
Pursuing the same objective of political visibility, the tribals—
a large but generally disregarded minority in Bengal—were also-
attempting to build intra-tribal links between their traditional
village councils. They had only limited success, the Santals
being perhaps the most enterprising.
These were violent years, with extremist organizations of
many kinds active in Bengal. The fascist and communist parties
of contemporary Europe provided models for some of the
younger Bengali agitators. The home-grown terrorist samiti
had extended their networks throughout much of rural as well
as urban Bengal, and their coercive tactics were now used
against their Muslim and Hindu political opponents as well as
against the British. During the civil disobedience campaigns
between 1930 and 1934, they gained sufficient strength and
weapons to engage the British police and military in guerrilla
warfare. In Midnapore district their repeated assassinations of
British officials temporarily broke British control, and the
Congress was able to run a parallel government for a time.
Aggressive Muslim revivalist groups, like the Ahmadiyyas
from north India, did battle (and the word is not used meta¬
phorically) with equally aggressive Hindu organizations like the
Arya Samaj, also an import from the Panjab. Societies to
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 209

oppose cow-slaughter and music before mosques fervently

sought evidence of offenses by their communal opponents. To
complete a dismal picture there were Calcutta’s goonda dol,
which enterprising politicians of both religions (H.S. Suhrawardy
and Sarat Bose among them) found useful as hired auxiliaries
in interparty fighting.
The period also gave thousands of Bengali nationalists
institutional experience of another kind: incarceration in British
jails or detention camps. No humour is intended in describing
these as political institutions. By crowding together prisoners
of widely differing ages, experience, ideological persuasion, and
region of origin, the British inadvertently created an environ¬
ment in which parties, platforms, manifestos, and conspiracies
flourished. The nationalists emerged from these political “staff
colleges” with a great deal besides their accolade of Prison
Graduate.-

Phases Four and Five: 1937-1947

The decade from 1937 to 1947 was so full of political excite¬

ment and tragedy for Bengal that although it seems lame to
describe its institutional history as simply more of the same,
such a characterization is not far wide of the mark. There
were some new developments. The cooperative movement,
which had limped along since early in the century, was given
new vigour in the late 1930s by the zeal of the Krishak Samitis
and the commitment of a provincial government armed with
an electoral mandate to reduce rural indebtedness and provide
new sources of agricultural credit. This was the first adminis¬
tration to take office under the 1935 Government of India Act,
which established responsible government in the province.
Its legislative backing included the Krishak Praja and Scheduled
Caste parties, the latter an important new element in Bengali
politics.
Radical legislation could also count upon the support of
the host of Marxist cells, which had hatched in the peculiarly
favourable conditions of the British prison camps. Many of the
younger terrorists had been converted to communism during
their internment, and their release in the late 1930s added to
the complextiy of Bengal politics. Muslim politics in Bengal
210 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

had always been notorious for its factionalism, and after

Das’ death the provincial Congress had seemed determined to
follow suit. With the expulsion of the dominant Bose group
at Gandhi’s instigation in 1939, and the formation of
the Forward Bloc, all chance of a unified nationalist movement
in Bengal was destroyed. Throughout the political infrastruc¬
ture—municipalities, student associations, trade unions, District
Congress Committees, Krishak Samitis—rival parties now
struggled for control. Adding to the clamour in Calcutta, and
reflecting a growing mood of regional exclusivism throughout
India, were new representative associations formed by non-
Bengalis. These groups had the dual function of providing
social welfare for their fellows and lobbying for the protection
of their corporate interests, particularly their employment.
In the last phase—the years immediately before independ¬
ence—we see some strikingly divergent developments. One
was the neighbourhood puja committees, which progressively
were transmuting the great Hindu festivals, most notably
Durga and Saraswati Puja, from family to community functions.
Given their detailed knowledge of their localities built up
through a number of years of fund raising, and the rivalries
which were generated with the sponsors of adjacent pandal,
these committees became useful adjuncts to the formal political
parties.
Many of the Marxists, meanwhile, had set to work among
Bengal’s proletariat—the industrial and plantation labourers,
and the landless tribals—and among the peasantry to foment
social revolution, for they saw the opportunities offered by the
disruptions which would inevitably accompany the departure
of the British. In some places in support of their campaign for
agricultural rent and tax resistance, they revived the loksangit
and jatra techniques employed many years before during the
first partition.
At the international level, Subhas Bose’s daring escape and
alliance with the Axis powers to form the Indian National Army
set the seal on the romance of violence in Bengal. Less romantic
and more immediately violent were the vigilante groups and
militia, organized by communal extremists of both the major
religions. These private armies skirmished throughout the early
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 211

1940s and finally closed in pitched battle in 1946. The bloodshed

ensured the partition of Bengal.

The Social Bases of Politics

If our understanding of the institutional history of twentieth-

century Bengal is imperfect, how much worse is the state of
our knowledge of the social bases of politics. No more than a
beginning has been made with the detailed research necessary
to trace the shifting regional, status, class, and age composition
of the political leadership or its following.
The institutional changes which have been sketched here
provide clues to those shifts, but they are no more than clues.
Besides, we must be cautious of reading too much into them.
Observing the preeminence of the landholder associations at
the beginning of the century, and their precipitate decline in
importance from the mid-1920s, we may rightly conclude that
the old zamindari class was losing power. We shall be misled,
however, if we also conclude from this example that all institu¬
tional decline reveals a shift in power to a new social stratum.
For instance, after 1918 the Indian Association sank into insigni¬
ficance, but the leadership of the Bengal Congress, which
superseded it, came from the same bhadralok status group that
had dominated nationalist politics in Bengal since the late
nineteenth century.
Elsewhere I have described the bhadralok: “a socially privileg¬
ed and consciously superior group, economically dependent upon
landed rents and professional and clerical employment; keeping
its distance from the masses by its acceptance of high-caste
proscriptions and its command of education; sharing a pride in
its language, its literate culture, and its history; and maintain¬
ing its communal integration through a fairly complex
institutional structure that it had proved remarkably ready to
adapt and augment to extend its social power and political
opportunities.”1 It has been a frequent cause for comment that
the bhadralok have continued to dominate political institutions,
providing leadership even after independence in West Bengal

1 Elite Conflict in a Plural Society. Twentieth-Century Bengal

(Berkeley, 1968), pp. 12-13;
212 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

and even in parties as radical as the Communist Party Marxist

and the Naxalites. This appearance of continuity is perhaps
illusory. The bhadralok category is probably too inexact for
detailed analysis, concealing rather than revealing subtle
changes in the social bases of power over the half century.
It is of no help, for instance, in measuring the effects of the
gene rational conflicts which periodically beset Bengali nationalist
politics—for example, during the first partition agitation and
again in the late 1920s when dissatisfaction with the infighting
and ideological bankruptcy of the Congress bosses led the
younger intellectuals to form the Socialist party. Similarly, we
must not overlook class tensions within bhadralok society which
appear on some crucial occasions, for example during the
non-cooperation debate of 1920, to have forced major changes
in political tactics.
This institutional analysis has revealed a reorientation from
1918 of nationalist organization toward the district towns, and
we find a parallel in the late 1920s in Muslim reorganization.
What this reflects is the growth of new wealth in the Bengal
countryside. To explain this growth we must look at Bengal’s
topography, which has always hindered easy communication,
and at its shifting river courses, treacherous climate, and debi¬
litating endemic diseases, which together have caused repeated
fluctuations in population density and agricultural productivity.
These fluctuations meant that even into the early years of the
present century there remained underused areas of Bengal and
its hinterland—for example, the Sunderbans, the char along the
Brahmaputra, the Terrai, and the sal jungles of the Chota
Nagpur fringe—which were available for economic enterprise
as transportation, agricultural, and health technologies were
improved. There has as yet been no study of who profited from
the opening of these new lands, nor is there an accurate
measure of the capital reinvested in agricultural land from East
Bengal’s jute trade, North Bengal’s tea industry, and West
Bengal’s mines. We do, however, observe the emergence by
1920 of a parvenu class (Muslim as well as Hindu) residing in
the district towns and controlling sections of the surrounding
countryside through powerful patronage networks.
It was this class which was best situated to take advantage
of the devolution of power to the district and local boards, as
SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL BASES OF POLITICS 213

also of the enlargement of the provincial legislature and the

extension of the franchise. It was they who most frequently
gained the organizational backing of the caste associations and
the consolidated Islamia Anjumans. They were the moving
force in the joatdar associations, and their investments
sustained, among other ventures, the district cooperative banks.
The existence and activities of a parvenu class should alert
us to the danger of assuming that once outside the cities and
past the rajbari of the great zamindars, all that was to be seen
in Bengal was an undifferentiated peasant mass. There were,
of course, a number of “fat cats” among the generally poor
rural populace. The thinnest of all—the dispossessed tribals
and other landless labourers--had no institutional representation
before independence. The non-occupancy raiyat and the poorer
sharecroppers appear to have had to wait until the 1940s for the
Marxists to give them a lead with the Tebhaga and similar
movements. It was the occupancy raiyat who were the prime
movers in the Krishak Samitis, and the mainstay along with
some of the higher tenure holders (joatdar, talukdar, and
patnidar) of the agricultural cooperatives. Thus what appear at
first sight to be institutions of the rural poor prove on closer
inspection to be new sources of strength for the moderately
well-to-do.
The political mobilization of the industrial proletariat in
Bengal, as we might predict from the European experience,
preceded that of rural landless labour by three decades. The
years immediately following World War I were seminal. War
demands had artificially stimulated industrial and mining
development in Bengal, but early in 1920 there was a severe
trade recession. To make matters worse a succession of natural
disasters in 1918 and 1919, including the great influenza
epidemic, had led to a sharp rise in the price of foodstuffs and
cotton goods. Wages did not respond to the price inflation.
The work conditions for industrial labour and the terms of
employment were generally deplorable.
We have already observed that the Khilafatists and Congress¬
men saw in this situation a fine opportunity for agitational
recruitment, and their initial successes added strength to the
non-cooperation movement. In the long run, however, the
politicians were faced with a thorny problem: they were
214 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Bengalis while almost all the industrial labourers were from Bihar
and the United Provinces. The sustained disinclination of these
men to accept Bengali leadership, as also their refusal to identify
themselves with the region in which they lived out their working
lives, has been the source of serious instability for twentieth-
century Bengal, East and West. The periodic resort to violence
by the “Biharis” should serve as a reminder that not all politics
is institutionalized. Historically the mob had been a potent
political force.
 10

Peasant Mobilization in
Twentieth Century Bengal*

The Naxalites

In the summer of 1967 young Marxist leaders of a peasant

association in Naxalbari in North Bengal organized an agita¬
tion to prevent rural landlords, dispossessed under land reform
legislation, from retaining control of their property through the
falsification of transfer deeds. Demonstrations against the
offenders were accompanied in some places by the seizure of
hoarded food-grains and the symbolic occupation of lands.
The death of a policeman in one such demonstration in late
May was followed by police firing, and this in turn provoked
the agitators to violence against their opponents. The state
government, a Marxist-dominated coalition, was reluctant to
sanction strong measures to contain the movement, but finally
in July it agreed to act. Fifteen hundred armed police were
poured into the area, and within three weeks the agitation was
smashed.

*This paper is dedicated to Dr. Sunil Kumar Sen, Professor of

History, Rabindra Bharati Univerity, a veteran of the Tebhaga struggle.
I am grateful for his sage guidance and warm friendship during my
1971-73 research visit to Calcutta, when the ideas for this paper were
generated.
216 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The movement had attracted attention throughout India,

and considerable support, particularly among young intellect¬
uals, in the West Bengal capital, Calcutta. In the months that
followed a new Marxist party was organized with the leader of
the North Bengal agitation as its chairman, and the govern¬
ment Marxist “opportunists” as its main target of criticism.
The Naxalites, as the group was called, espoused terrorist
violence against the “people’s oppressors”, and called for
support in a general uprising: “Today the basic task is to
liberate the rural areas through revolutionary armed agrarian
revolution and encircle the cities and, finally, to liberate the
cities and thus complete the revolution throughout the
country.,yl
The immediate targets of Naxalite attacks were business and
professional men, government officials and judges, and partci-
ularly policemen. The revolutionaries had remarkable success
in 1969 and 1970 in terrorizing Calcutta and other West Bengal
cities, from which the great majority of their members were
drawn. By contrast they found they could not operate effective¬
ly in the countryside, where they met with general hostility. A
number died at the hands of village mobs, and, once govern¬
ment resources were sufficiently organized to drive them from
their Calcutta refuges, the movement was lost.

Country Versus City

This episode typifies efferts to mobilize the Bengal peasantry.

Time and again in this century we find cases of urban-based
intellectual radicals going out to seek support for a cause
among the rural cultivators, and being rejected forcefully. As
in this instance, they often moved to take advantage of
apparently propitious disturbances in the countryside, and
consequently were the more discountenanced by their failure. As
also in this case, the advocacy and commission of violence was
common, for violence is a well-worn (if not well-honoured) tradi¬
tion of Bengali political life—in the countryside as much as in
the cities, as carpet-bagging townsmen have found to their cost.

1Marcus F. Franda: Radical Politics in West Bengal (Cambridge,

Mass., 1971), p. 173. On the Naxalites, see ibid., pp. 149-81, and
Sankar Ghosh: “The Naxalite Struggle in West Bengal,” South Asian
Review, vol. 4, no. 2, Jan. 1971, pp. 99-105.
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 217

To understand these difficulties faced by Bengal’s political

•elites we must take account of a striking demographic factor:
in this region are juxtaposed one of the world’s most dense and
overwhelmingly agrarian populations, with one of the world’s
largest cities.2 By the turn of this century Calcutta, with its twin
Howrah, already had a million and a quarter people. Its popula¬
tion has continued to grow inexorably, if erratically, and is now
close to eight million. Immense power and political opportunity
was concentrated in Calcutta, particularly in the colonial period.
It was the capital of British India through the first decade of
the century; it remained thereafter the chief commercial,
industrial, foreign trading, judicial, educational, and cultural
center of the sub-continent. It was so much bigger and
apparanty so much more important than anything else in the
region, the political scope it offered seemed so great, that many
a Bengal politician was tempted to disregard all else. Calcutta
could become a world in itself, demanding special political
techniques, and giving in return its special rewards and its
peculiar experience.
But Calcutta was not all in all. The great mass of Bengal’s
population and the largest part of its wealth lay in the rural
hinterland, and this could not be neglected entirely. Even early
in the century the imperatives of the nationalist movement—
the desire to mobilize greater numbers in the struggle against
the British—encouraged the leadership to hazard political forays
outside the towns. The progressive extension of the franchise
at approximately twelve-year intervals from 1909 made for a
more sustained rural effort by both nationalists and their
opponents, and provided a route for countrymen to enter
institutional politics.3

2In 1911 only 6 per cent of Bengal’s population lived in towns, and
of that urban population 41 per cent was in Calcutta and Howrah.
Seventy-five perc ent of the region’s population was engaged in agricul¬
ture, and there were 600 people to the square mile (Census of India,
1911). Fifty years later 25 per cent of the population of West Bengal (the
Indian portion of partitioned Bengal) was urban, of which 88 per cent
was concentrated in the Calcutta metropolitan area. Fifty-four per cent
of the region’s population was still employed in agriculture, and the
population density had risen to 1,033 to the square mile {Census of India,
1961).
3For a discussion of institutional politics in pre-Independence Bengal
 218 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The incentives existed, but the knowledge and skills to mobil¬

ize the peasantry were only slowly acquired. In particular there
appears to have been a gulf of incomprehension at the com¬
plexity of rural society. Like so many academic historians,
Bengal’s urban-based politicians of the first quarter century
spoke vaguely of the vast peasant masses, whom they alter¬
nately characterized as offering great radical potential or
posing a fearful threat to the maintenance of ordered political
life.
They were of course aware of, and seriously concerned with
the problems posed by, the religious pluralism of the region.
Bengal’s population contained almost equal numbers of Hindus
and Muslims, and a sizeable minority of tribals, who were
mostly Animists or Buddhists.
What the politicians appear not to have comprehended fully
was the fierce strength of localism, which complicated the reli¬
gious, as well as every other, problem of social and political
integration. Bengal had no unified political tradition. Even
under the Mughals, who, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth
centuries, had incorporated most parts of north and central
India under one rule, large areas of Bengal had remained in
independent principalities. From the mid-eighteenth century
Calcutta had increasingly acted as a metropolis for the entire
region, but there was a concomitant growth of local antagonism
toward the great city, its dominant institutions and dominant
elites.
The development of a network of navigation canals in the
delta, and of the railways in the second half of the nineteenth
century, extended Calcutta’s influence in the hinterland, facili¬
tating the movement of products and people to and from the
city. This was counterbalanced, however, by the growth of new
marketing and governmental centers, for the same period saw
a great extension of the colonial administrative and judicial
apparatus. Based in these growing rural towns (as they are
aptly called in Indian English) were new local elites, composed

see J.H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth-

Century Bengal (Berkeley, 1968); and Chapter 9 of the present volume;
Leonard A. Gordon: Bengal: the Nationalist Movement, 1876-1940
(New York, 1974); and John Gallagher; “Congress in Decline: Bengal,
1930-1939”, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 7, part 3, July 1973, pp. 589-645.
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 219

mostly of parvenu families who had taken advantage of the

entrepreneurial opportunities accompanying the improvement
of transportation, the growth of the Calcutta and foreign
markets, and the expansion of the bureaucracy.
The half century preceding World War I had seen the exten¬
sion of Bengal’s agricultural “frontier.” The topography of
the region had always hindered easy communication. Its shifting
river courses, treacherous climate, and debilitating endemic
diseases caused repeated local fluctuations in population
densities and agricultural productivity. This meant that, even
into the early years of the present century, there remained
underutilized areas of Bengal and its fringe available for econo¬
mic enterprise as transportation, agricultural, and health techno¬
logies were improved. New cash crops were introduced in
many areas; trade in lumber became profitable; and fortunes
were made in the mining of coal, clays, and minerals. Much
of the capital for these extractive industries was generated
from agriculture, and much of the profit was reinvested in
agricultural land or, more exactly, in rent-producing rural
tenures.4

Legal and Sociological Categories

Great scope for speculation in rents was provided by

Bengal’s notoriously complex land tenure system, a legacy of
its political history.5 To generalize grossly, there were five legal
levels:

Raj—The State
Zamindar—Superior Landlord
Joatdar—Superior Tenure Holder
4For further discussion see Chapt. 11 of the present volume.
5It would be more accurate to say that Bengal had overlapping sets
of land-tenure systems. As a consequence, the names for similar tenures
varied from one locality to the next. The elaborate subinfeudation was
the source of interminable disputes over land rights, and the resulting
judicial cases impoverished many a landed family, while enriching their
lawyers. See Tapan Raychaudhuri, “Permanent Settlement in Opera¬
tion, Bakarganj District, East Bengal,” Land Control and Social Struc¬
ture in Indian History, (ed. Robert Eric Frykenberg, Madison, 1969),
pp. 163-74; and Report of the Land Revenue Commission, Bengal
(Alipore, 1940).
220 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Raiyat—Cultivating Tenant
Bhagadar—Sharecropper

This structure, with its appearance of well-defined categories,

and its impressive body of judicial and administrative document¬
ation, has provided a continuing framework of analysis for
economic and social historians. It is a snare and a delusion.
The social realities of the Bengal countryside are obscured
rather than illuminated by these legal classifications.
It is not surprising that academics, with their overweening
regard for documents, should have been led astray; what is
more remarkable is that Bengal’s city politicians appear habitu¬
ally to have fallen into the same error. Perhaps it is relevant
that the majority were lawyers, members of another fraternity
predisposed to rely on the written word. In justification of
their equation of legal with social categories they could point to
the presence in the rural towns of organizations bearing titles
such as Zamindar Associations, Joatdar Societies, and Raiyat
Cooperatives. The existence of these bodies tells us there were
smalltown or rural interest groups who found it useful to
associate under a label recognized in the legal codes. It tells us
little, however, about economic relationships and the exercise
of power in the countryside.
Landlord, money-lender, peasant—here is an alternative and
simpler categorization: the one customarily relied upon by the
British, and the basis for their rural reform legislation. It proves
no more helpful.

Acquisition of Power

What we must do, if we are to understand Bengal rural

society as the groundwork for studying the history of peasant
mobilization, is to look at the means by which power was
acquired and held. What we find is a common pattern, albeit
with infinite local variation, that cuts across the religious,
caste, and legal divisions.
The first requirement was to secure control, direct or indirect,
of good arable land. This at the very least insured a supply of
food for oneself, family and other dependents in the recurrent
times of scarcity. Frequently it also provided a surplus in those
-crises when the ability to supply or withhold food and seed
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 221

grains gave one immense leverage with others. In an agrarian

economy where formal credit institutions were at first non¬
existent, and. when established, almost inaccessible because of
bureaucratic red tape and corruption, the power of the man
who could give quick loans of grain or money was great; and
the opportunities for wealth equally great if one had sanctions
to enforce the payment of outrageous rates of interest.
The most direct, if crude, sanction was the threat of violence
to property or person, and the lathial, the club-wielding thug
in the employ of a powerful man, is a ubiquitous figure in
twentieth-century rural Bengal. To this day there is rivalry
between localities as to which produces the best lathials. A
more genteel procedure was to use the state-licensed lathials—
the police—and the British had obligingly introduced a fine in¬
strument of aggression—the land mortgage deed—which could
be used to secure police assistance in coercion of insubordi¬
nate debtors.
More subtle, but equally effective, was control of the pro¬
cessing and distribution of the basic agricultural commodity of
an area. In most places this meant the husking and milling of
paddy, its warehousing, and its transportation to a railway
station or a river steamer landing.
Access to markets was obviously essential to agricultural
producers; access to the administrative and judicial bureaucracy
was almost equally important, and power was available to those
who could control such access. There was a variety of means
by which this might be done, ranging all the way from the use
of carefully cultivated friendships, through bribery, to the most
certain means of all: the acquisition of an appointment in the
bureaucracy for oneself or a close relative. Patronage was the
name of the game: a fascinating, seamless web in which a man
was patron to many clients, and himself the client of more
powerful men.
All these deadly serious games of power could be played at
any level of rural society. The scale was different at different
levels—or, to continue the game metaphor, the stakes were
higher when the resources available to the players were greater
— but the rules of the game were much the same at every level.
Now we can understand why it makes little sense to attempt
to analyze rural society in terms of landlord, money-lender,.
222 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

and peasant. These were not discrete roles. Ambitious culti¬

vators with good land invariably used their surpluses to make
loans to their neighbours and, if successful in accumulating
more capital, they would most commonly invest in rent-produc¬
ing or sharecropped lands. In favourable circumstances they
could rapidly combine all three roles of peasant, money-lender,
and landlord, and sustain those roles indefinitely. Moreover,
the level of the tenure that they purchased depended less on
its rank order in the legal hierarchy, than upon the access
which it gave to good land and control of people on the land.
In one instance it might be best to buy a raiyati tenure; in
another, a zamindari. It all depended on the quality of the
land and the human entanglements involved. This is why the
legal categories can be so misleading, and why it is equally
misleading to attempt to draw a line across the rural social
order, and declare that those above it (zamindars and joatdars
perhaps) were powerful, and those below (raiyats and bhaga-
dars) powerless. Big men and little there were; fat cats and
thin—but they were not ranked and neatly ordered.
Interestingly enough, the bigger men faced a problem that
the smaller did not. To sustain their larger enterprise, they
needed market and bureaucratic contacts at greater distances
from their village base, in the towns and perhaps even in
Calcutta. The danger was that they would lose that intimate
contact with their locality indispensable for continued
dominance in the highly personal world of peasant society,
where rivals were always waiting to knock the feet out from
under the successful man, and where today’s clients could
become tomorrow’s agents of an enemy. Patronage may
indeed be “lop-sided friendship,”6 but in that asymmetry is
great potential for enmity.
The successful man who moved his center of operations to
the sub-divisional or district town (to move any further afield
was rarely expedient) could, if skilful, use his extended family,
more distant kin, and hand-picked caste fellows to protect
his interests in the home territory. An alternative was to depute
a brother, cousin, son, or nephew to do the urban work.
Whichever way the net was spread, it overlay and reinforced

CJ.A. Pitt-Rivers, The People of the Sierra (London, 1954), p. 140.

 PEASANT MOBILIZATION 223

that other network of patron-clientage, binding village and

rural town together in one system—and helping us compre¬
hend the behavioural basis of the sustained strength of localism.
This description of the process by which power was gained
and held will be misleading if it gives the impression that all
individuals or groups had equal opportunities for mobility.
That is patently incorrect, and the attention I have just given
to the importance of family-kin-caste networks is the clue to
the main area of inequality: some communities had preferred
access to the bureaucracy because their kinsmen were the
bureaucrats. For at least the first three decades of this century,
the Hindu high castes enjoyed an overwhelming predo¬
minance at all levels of the administrative and legal systems in
Bengal.

Peasant Mobilization?

Conservatism, and resistance to intrusions from the outside,

are surely characteristic of a system such as this. How then
can we expect to find peasant mobilization? With difficulty,
is the short answer.
But there is a longer answer. Demography is again our
point of departure. I have spoken of the extension of Bengal’s
agricultural “frontier” in the latter half of the nineteenth
century. By the beginning of the second decade of this century,
at the latest, all new lands had been fully occupied, and with
widespread famine and epidemic disease better controlled,
population numbers were climbing precipitously. The develop¬
ment of industry and other alternative sources of employment
did not keep pace, and pressure on the land became intense.
The numbers of landless grew, and hostilities in rural society
increased proportionately.
This was the environment into which the nationalist move¬
ment intruded. It was at the end of World War I, with major
constitutional reforms in prospect and a struggle under way
for control of the Bengal organs of the Indian National Con¬
gress, that the first sustained effort was made to extend organ¬
ization and recruitment to the rural towns. In the following
four years, under Gandhi’s national leadership, support was
mobilized for a programme of non-cooperation, the aim being a
224 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

total boycott of governmental institutions. The towns were

the major arena of confrontation, but, given the networks
linking town and village, the impact was felt in the countryside.
An example will illustrate this. In January 1921 in Midnapore
District, which lies to the southwest of Calcutta, the first
elections were held for union boards, new local councils pro¬
vided by the Bengal Village Self-Government Act of 1919. The
electors were uncertain as to what they were voting for, but
they had a vague idea that they were electing representatives
to arbitrate village disputes and thus save lawyer and court
fees. Many were dismayed when they discovered that they had,
in fact, assisted in the formation of new bodies empowered to
levy taxes. They were convinced that the urban people would
use these to swindle them.
A local Congressman, Birendra Nath Sasmal, saw his opportu¬
nity. He organized meetings at which he warned that the
Village Self-Government Act opened the way for crushing
taxation and other oppressions by the government. Resist now
or forever be taxed, he declaimed. To win the all-important
support of the small town elites, he used a factional rivalry.
In the Contai subdivision, to which he belonged, the elite
was divided into two groups: the locals and people from outside
districts who had established themselves in practice in the
Contai law courts and other professions. The legislative council
and union board elections had been fought out between candi¬
dates of these two groups, and the “immigrants” had triumph¬
ed. Sasmal, who was a member of the dominant Mahishya
caste, now took the leadership of the locals and carried them
with him in his attack on the union boards.
The people were persuaded to refuse to pay taxes under the
Village Self-Government Act, and the members of the boards,
were encouraged to reconsider the wisdom of their implement¬
ing the Act. By late June the Contai bazaar and walls along
village roads carried inflammatory posters threatening the
members with violence. Resignations soon followed, and those
who held out had social and religious boycotts applied to them.
Some were even prevented from securing labour to reap their
paddy.
Having brought the operation of the union boards to a
standstill in Contai, Sasmal turned his attention to other parts.
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 225

ofMidnapore District, with similar success. By November

the government was forced to admit that it would be better to
suspend the Act than fight Congress on such shaky ground.
Throughout his campaign, Sasmal had been careful to draw
a distinction between the refusal of union board taxes, and
that of land revenue taxes, for the latter were inextricably
entwined with rent payments so essential a part of the income
of his class of smalltown notables. In December 1921, however,
he was imprisoned by the British, and the opposing Congress
faction— the Gandhians—who had a more radical rural policy,
stumped his district urging that the land tax be withheld. The
peasants needed little persuading, for economically they had
had a bad year and politically a very active one. As Sasmal and
others had feared, they had their own ideas as to where the
line should be drawn in the payment of tax: many were soon
refusing all rent, to individual landlords as well as to the govern¬
ment. When, in some places, attempts were made to coerce
them, landlords and their bailiffs were beaten. Such violence
was becoming widespread, and, as a consequence, Gandhi
called off the entire movement early in 1922. The political
workers withdrew from the countryside, and the peasants were
left to their fate7. Our historical records do not tell us what
reprisals they suffered.

Voters and Associations

Congress’ agitational campaigns were sporadic, though

exceedingly important in spreading ideas and furnishing organ¬
izational models. Less dramatic but of more sustained signifi¬
cance were the elective institutions that had been expanded
into the countryside in the same post-World War I period. The
union boards were the lowest level in the system; the highest
within Bengal was the provincial Legislative Council, to elect
which over a million men had been enfranchised. There was
heavy urban weightage, but the wealthy and a small percentage
of the moderately prosperous in the countryside now had the
vote.
The candidates for office were, as we might expect, those

7See Broomfield, Elite Conflicts, pp. 210-12, 224-26.

 226 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

same powerful entrepreneurial figures who controlled the more

extensive patronage networks, or their brokers, the small-town
lawyers. The need to garner votes forced the candidates into
alliances with other powerful figures, and some found it useful
to formalize these alliances by forming “representative” volunt¬
ary associations with the misleading titles to which I referred
earlier, namely, Joatdar Associations and Kisan Sabhas (Peasant
Societies).
More important, because more comprehensive in their
functions, were the caste associations. Some caste sabhas in
Bengal dated from much earlier, but it was in the second and
third decade of this century that many middle and lower castes
were organizing.
The normal pattern of the new associations was for a handful
of educated and professionally employed members residing in
a district town or, more frequently, Calcutta to form a com¬
mittee. Through printed circulars and at meetings called in
the town most conveniently located for the majority of caste
members, they explained the objectives of the proposed associa¬
tion. Typically, these included the improvement of the caste’s
ritual practices to conform with the higher status to which they
claimed it was entitled. Stress was laid upon ensuring that
this “correct” ranking, and a caste name appropriate to it, be
recorded at the decennial census. In some cases the abolition
of endogamous subgroups within the caste was urged; in others,
particularly where there was marked occupational differentia¬
tion between the divisions, a complete split was advocated.
In view of the new powers vested in local councils and the
provincial legislature, atten'ion was drawn to the opportunities
open to the caste if its members gave solid support to those
of their fellows (usually the prime movers in the association)
who were candidates for elective office. Caste members were
urged to subscribe to make possible the educational campaign
needed to effect these reforms; and to enable the association
to provide aid for indigent caste members. Where the appeals
were successful, the associations usually began the publication
of caste journals, but few were sustained.8

8For a general discussion of caste associations, see Lloyd I. and

Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, The Modernity of Tradition'. Political Develop-
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 227

In the Muslim community there was a similar reorganization

and extension of the local Islamia Anjumans, which provided
a vehicle from the mid-twenties for bitterly anti-Hindu and
anti-Congress propaganda. Muslim voters were exhorted to
support only those candidates who were committed to an attack
on high-caste Hindu dominance, and the community as a whole
was urged to take courage from its superior unity and its
growing numerical superiority to resist the Hindus, with violence
if need be. The 1930s and 1940s, decades of severe economic
and political dislocation, give ugly evidence of the effectiveness
of this teaching.
There was one leading Muslim politician, A.K. Fazlul Huq,
who resisted the separatist trend. He foresaw the enfranchise¬
ment of additional large numbers of cultivators, and correctly
predicted that support of a section of rural lower-caste Hindus,
as well as Muslims, could be won by a politician who would
ad\ocate restrictions on the great landholders and the larger
urban-based entrepreneurs. His Krishak Praja Party (Peasants
and Tenants Party) formed in 1929 drew up a platform of
reform legislation to reduce rural indebtedness and foster
peasant cooperatives; control rents and abolish landlords’
customary exactions; and provide universal primary education
“without taxation of the poor.” A commission to review the
land tenure system was also promised.
In 1935 five million new rural voters were enfranchised (three
million of them Muslims, and 800,000 untouchables and
tribals); they put the Krishak Praja Party into power to im¬
plement its proposals. That the Huq Government’s achieve¬
ment did not match its pre-election rhetoric will come as little
surprise, particularly when we note that Huq—a lawyer and
tenure-holder from the Eastern Bengal district of Bakarganj—
and all his influential party colleagues, were from that class
of small-town notables who had so much invested in the
existing system. A strengthening of the position of the rural

merit in India (Chicago, 1967), pp. 17-154; R.S. Khare: The Changing
Brahmins: Associations and Elites Among the Kanya-Kubjas of North
India (Chicago, 1970), pp. 195-221; and Imtiaz Ahmad: “Caste Mobility
Movements in North India,” Indian Economic and Social History
Review, vol. 8, no. 2, June 1971, pp. 164-91.
228 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

middle-rung at the expense of the biggest men they would

welcome, but fundamental change in the system they would
not.

Depression, War, Famine, and Partition

Their radical talk, however, was heady stuff for a peasantry

that had been exposed for a decade and a half, intermittently
but at times intensively, to the propaganda of a procession
of political activists: Gandhians, revolutionary terrorists,
Muslim separatists, Hindu temple reformers and, most recently,
Marxists. More importantly, that same peasantry was in the
grip of a disastrous price recession.
From the beginning of the century, prices for Bengal’s
agricultural commodities had risen markedly, the main cash
crop, jute, for example, selling in the mid-twenties for two-
and-a-half to three times its 1900 price. In 1928 a 400-pound
bale of raw jute was worth 74 rupees; by 1934 it could fetch
scarcely 27. Short-term fluctuations in the price of a single
commodity—fluctuations even this severe—were not unpre¬
cedented, but this slump lasted eight years and, with the
depression worldwide, prices for all crops were affected.9
In the thirty years preceding the crash, rents had been
steadily increased, and most peasants had attempted to convert
their payments from produce to cash, in order to benefit from
inflation. Now with rents fixed at a cash figure and prices
tumbling, they were hoist with their own petard.10 The Huq
government tried to give relief by amortizing a portion of rural
debts but in many places this simply discouraged creditors
from making new loans. Rural credit was nearly frozen, and
the number of distress sales of holdings jumped dramatically.
The chief beneficiaries were the middle-level tenure holders,
who had the resources to retain their land, and in some cases

9Dharam Narain, The Impact cf Price Movements on Areas Under

Selected Crops in India, 1900-1939 (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 163-65.
10Binay Bhusan Chaudhuri; “Agrarian Movements in Bengal and
Bihar, 1919-1939,” Socialism in India, (ed. B.R. Nanda, Delhi, n.d.),
p. 202; Report of the Bengal Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee,
1929-30 (Calcutta, 1930); and N C. Bhattacharyya & L.A. Natesan,
eds.. Some Bengal Villages. An Economic Survey (Calcutta, 1932).
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 229

add more from their distressed neighbours, but who were not
under legislative attack as was the class above them.
For Bengal, as for most parts of India, the outbreak of
World War II brought a sudden economic upturn. Agricultural
prices, already recovering, shot to new levels; industry grew
as never before, with an impact on mining and the transporta¬
tion services. By 1942. however, with Burma in Japanese hands
and large concentrations of British and American troops in
and around Calcutta preparing to resist an invasion of eastern
India, resource mangement in the region was clearly becoming
too much for the skeleton British administration. Rice no
longer came from Burma, Asia’s greatest exporter in the inter¬
war period, and the clearing of strategic areas of eastern Bengal
as an anti-invasion tactic further reduced food supplies. The
military were stockpiling, and, sensing an impending crisis,
grain dealers began hoarding their supplies. The attempted
“Quit India” revolution and a severe cyclone that devastated
large areas of southwestern Bengal were the final straws. In
1943 famine gripped the region, killing between one and a
half and two million people, of whom a majority died on the
streets of Calcutta, whence they had dragged themselves in
the vain hope of finding food. It was a hideous disaster, the
more so because the fat cats in the countryside, who controlled
what food-grain there was, made a killing.11
Economic depression, war, and famine did not produce
revolution in Bengal. They did aggravate the hostilities between
religious communities, and these years were scarred with
brutal communal rioting, which assumed the proportions of
civil war for a time in 1946. Why no peasant revolution? The
answer clearly is that the conservative forces in the country¬
side had not been weakened in these years. Moreover, it
was their political organizations, based in the rural towns, that
were now devoted to communal confrontation.
The problems faced by radicals in this situation can be
illustrated from the North Bengal district of Dinajpur, where
the Kisan Sabha was taken over in 1938 by young Communists,
part of the large body of Bengali terrorists whose long prison
terms in the thirties had resulted in their conversion to

11Famine Enquiry Commission'. Report on Bengal (New Delhi, 1945).

230 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Marxism. The appeals by these men to the peasantry provoked

organized resistance from both the local Muslim League and
the Kshatriya Samiti, the caste association of the dominant
Rajbanshi community. Police repression ultimately drove them
underground. It was not until late in 1946, with the upheavals
accompanying the end of the war and the projected partition
of Bengal, that they judged the time ripe for another revolu¬
tionary attempt. They launched the Tebhaga Movement: a
demand that the bhagctdars (sharecroppers) retain two-thirds
instead of only one-half the crop. Their success in mobilizing
peasant support for the agitation was unprecedented, but
significantly much of that support came from tribals and ex-
tribals12 (the same communities, we should note, that were
responsible for the Naxalbari movement twenty years later).
Lack of support from the Muslims and caste Hindus insured
the collapse of the agitation once sizable contingents of armed
police were moved into the area. Within three months the
Marxist leaders, almost all of whom were urban intellectuals,
had been driven into hiding, and prominent peasant partici¬
pants killed.13
Bengal was partitioned a few months later, two-thirds of
its area (the rich eastern delta) going to Pakistan, and the drier,
less fertile west, with Calcutta, remaining in India. In the
former area the Muslim middle-peasants appear to have
strengthened their hands at the expense of Hindu landlords
and urban elites, most of whom were coerced into leaving
for India by the early fifties. We know relatively little of the
subsequent development of rural society in East Pakistan and
Bangladesh, but it appears that there has been no radical
redistribution of land.14

“The term “ex-tribal” has been applied by anthropologists to those

who have atlempted to become Hindus through the adaptation of their
group culture to what they perceive to be Hindu mores, but whose
tribal antecedents are still evident to the caste Hindus and Muslims
among whom they live.
13Sunil Sen, Agrarian Struggle in Bengal, 1946-47 (New Delhi, 1972);
and Hamza Alavi, “Peasants and Revolution,” Socialist Register 1965,
(ed. Ralph Miliband and John Savile, London, 1965), pp. 265-77.
“The only case studies of rural Eastern Bengal since the 1947 parti¬
tion have been produced by scholars associated with the Pakistan
Academy for Rural Development at Comilla. They deal with the
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 231

In West Bengal the Congress came to power after Inde¬

pendence committed to land redistribution, but in the first
round—thtzamindari abolition legislation of 1954—and to
a lesser extent in the second currently under way, fictitious
transfers have protected all but the largest landlords from
too serious a loss.15 Even the communist parties—of which
West Bengal has a number, all intractably opposed to one
another—appear to have compromised with the local rural
elites in their increasingly successful search for an electoral
base in the countryside. Calcutta, full of dispossessed Eastern
Bengal middle class, is a hotbed of radicalism, and there, in
the coffee houses around the university, the peasantry of West
Bengal and Bangladesh, indeed of the whole of Asia, are
mobilized daily.

Mobilization Without Revolution

A central question is unresolved: why has there been no

peasant revolution in this vast, depressed agricultural region?
In the first place because there is no peasantry in the sense
of a distinct rural class with a shared awareness of injustice
suffered, or even of interests held in common. There are myriad
divisions in Bengal rural society: local, regional, linguistic,
religious, sectarian, racial, caste, tribal, class, and factional.16

area encompassed by the Academy’s development program, and as such

are probably unrepresentative. As examples see Mary Jane Beech et al..
Inside the Eas' Pakistan Village—Six Articles (East Lansing, 1966);
and S.M. Hafeez Zaidi, The Village Culture in Transition: A Study of
Eas! Pakistan Rural Society (Honolulu, 1970). For more general mate¬
rial see Azizur Rahman Khan, The Economy of Bangladesh (London,
1972), and “Bangladesh: Economic Policies Since Independence,” South
Asian Review, vol. 8, no. 1, Oct. 1974, pp. 13-32.
“During the symposium, 1 commented upon the consistency with
which peasantries have been betrayed with promises of land redistribu¬
tion. A pattern is clearly discernible: politicians seeking to mobilize a
peasantry in order to gain power promise land redistribution; once
in power they redistribute land in such a way as to gain or retain the
support of powerful sections of rural society. The weak are calculatingly
excluded.
“For an excellent case study illustrating this see Ralph W. Nicholas,
“Village Factions and Political Parties in Rural West Bengal,” Joural of
Commonwealth Political Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, Nov. 1963, pp. 17-32.
232 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The strong binding ties are not horizontal—between those of

similar occupation and economic status—but vertical—between
kinsmen and caste fellows, often of widely divergent economic
levels, and between clients and patrons. The conservative
strength of these networks, to which we alluded earlier, lies
in their ability to reward participants and elfect reprisals
against those who attempt to step out of line. We also noted
the resistance of such a system to intrusions from the outside,
unless (and the qualification is important) such intrusions are
channelled through the networks, thereby reinforcing the power
and prestige of the “bosses.”
Such a system is not unique to Bengal and, on its own, is
insufficient explanation of the absence of revolution. Other
factors must be taken into account. One is the extensive
penetration of the Bengal countryside through the past fifty
years of formal political institutions, which have both reinforc¬
ed the vertical patron-client-kin networks and hardened the
lines of social division. Whether these are representative
assemblies designed by government bureaucrats, such as the
provincial and state legislatures, the municipalities, and the
village councils, or political parties and interest groups con¬
structed by politicians, their origin almost invariably has been
Calcutta or one of the larger towns, and they have been linked
to the countryside through the upper levels of the patron-client-
kin networks.
Moreover, they have been organized in such a way as to
reproduce the segmented character of rural society. Until at
least the early fifties, voters for the representative councils,
local as well as provincial, were organized into separate
constituencies according to religion and race, caste and tribe.
Similarly, the object of many of the voluntary associations was
the representation of communal interests. This was the raison
d'etre of the caste and tribal associations, and of the Islamia
Anjumans; there were political parties with the same avowed
purpose.
The existence of these political institutions and the increas¬
ing degree of peasant participation in them, serves to remind
us that peasant mobilization and peasant revolution are not
synonymous. In Bengal, as elsewhere, peasants are often
 PEASANT MOBILIZATION 233

mobilized through institutions that serve to sustain, not threaten,

the structures of power.
That those structures are oppressive for the vast majority
of the peasantry in Bengal is a certainty. Why then are they
tolerated? One answer has been suggested: to resist is to
invite reprisals, and the cost of unsuccessful resistance is too
high for most to contemplate seriously. Another answer is
that not all peasants are equally oppressed. Indeed, as our
discussion of the means by which power is acquired in rural
Bengal should have indicated, it is often difficult to distinguish
oppressed from the oppressor. Though every Bengal peasant
has someone’s boot on his neck, many have the concurrent
satisfaction of stepping on someone else’s face. Inequality,
the bane of the hierarchical society, is also its chief delight.
Among those at the very bottom of the rural heap are the
tribals, weak and vulnerable, but nursing a fierce sense of
historic injury at the hands of caste Hindus and Muslims, who
have stolen their land, shattered their tribal organization and
their culture, exploited their labour, and dishonoured their
women. There is no risk of the tribals losing their sense of
separate identity when they are constantly derided by the Hindus
and Muslims as racial and cultural inferiors, and kept on the
hungry margins of society. In their folk traditions they treasure
memories of revolt, and the dead heroes of those uprisings
are invested with messianic powers.17 In their anger and
despair the tribals are ready to revolt again, but there is no
millenium in twentieth-century Bengal. The spectacle of these
proud little men and women, led by urban intellectual radicals
because they no longer have tribal leaders, pitting their bows
and arrows against the rifles of the armed police, epitomizes
the tragedy of rural Bengal.

17See for example Suresh Singh: Tl:e Dust-Storm and the Hanging
Mist! a Study of Birsa Munda and His Movement in Chotanagpur, 1874-
1901 (Calcutta, 1966).
 Appendix B

F.O. Bel], I.C.S., to author, 23 July 1975

“You are quite right. Legal status of land-holdings had

little to do with “social'’ class. Zamindars, or proprietors
paying revenue direct to the Government in the Permanently
Settled area were not necessarily different from tenure-holders.
Many tenures were a form of sub-letting to make more
manageable units as between co-sharers of the same family. Of
course, there were some big landlords who owned land in big
estates, such as we were familiar with in England—at least
until very recent times. Then there was a great variety of
revenue payers, who were of varying degrees of wealth, some
relatively small country residents. ... A jote was a common
name for a holding throughout North Bengal. A jotedar had
become colloquially, the term for a big cultivator. The jotedars
whom I knew in the Terai of Darjeeling, and in Rangpur and
Dinajpur were mostly ‘of the soil’, and were probably descended
from the people who were actual cultivators before the British
had anything to do with the administration of the country.
Similarly, the howladars of the Bakarganj district were more
cultivators than rent collectors. In Rangpur, we found many
very big jotes, more in the nature of tenures than of cultivating
hold ngs, and determination of the standing of these, under the
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 235

terms of the Bengal Tenancy Act, was a principal source of

legal work in the Settlement Operations of that district. The
sharecroppers went by different names in different parts of
Bengal. They were called ‘adhiars’ in North Bengal; Bargadars
in the East—as in Bakarganj and Dacca. Elsewhere I believe
the term 'bhagichasi’ was used.
“I think you have a mistaken idea of the role of the police
in Bengal. Police would never be used to enforce a court order
to pay money owed for debt unless there had been an assault
on the court peon (‘bailiff’ as he would be described in England),
or it was known that there was a definite politically organised
movement to stop payment of rent and sums due to public
authorities. I doubt whether the mortgage deed could be des¬
cribed as a British innovation. It seems to me that it is an
inevitable derivation from an increasing cash economy, and
from transferability of rights in land. Much of the legal/
economic history of Bengal in my time—-and indeed much
earlier, concerned the transferability of raiyati holdings. In
1928, these were made transferable subject to a “landlord’s
transfer fee’ which was payable on registration of the sale
deed, and sent on through the Collectorate. I imagine that
previously such raiyati land was sold without any fee or for¬
mal recognition by the landlord. This fee was a great source
of complaint, and to no one’s surprise was abolished almost
at once, when the new Legislative Assembly under the 1935
Government of India Act took over from 1st April 1937.
“It is my belief that the greater part of rural indebtedness
was incurred on simple handnote, and not on mortgage deeds.
But the end might be the same. If a debtor could not clear
his debt, then eventually he would find himself sold up if he
had no other assets. As often as not he would clear his debt
by transferring the necessary land by a private sale without
having to undergo process in Court. Under the Bengal Tenancy
Amendment Act of 1928, the only legal form of mortgage of a
raiyati holding, was the ‘complete usufructuary mortgage’ by
which capital and interest would be satisfied over a period not
exceeding fifteen years. But apart from the special provisions
relating to aboriginals, there were no general provisions in
the Tenancy Act barring transferability. Where there were
railway facilities and rice mills were set up, you often found big
236 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

peasant families which had gone in for money-lending and

paddy dealing. But sometimes industry required rather more
capita], and outsiders, such as Marwaris or other ‘up-country’
men might be owners of rice or sugar mills, or be distributing
agents for kerosene.
“Although I was for 16 months, Collector of Midnapore, I
am regrettably ignorant about Biren Sasmal and his anti-Union
Board agitation. He had died well before my time (1943-44).
But I do know that he effectively stopped the introduction of
Union Boards into the Mahisya dominated areas of the district.
Union Boards were a genuine attempt to make a more demo¬
cratic administration in the countryside. Composed of nine
members—six elected and three nominated by the Government
they took over the collection of the chaukidari tax, and pay¬
ment of the chaukidars (‘Village watchmen’), and had very
considerable powers, if they chose to use them, to maintain
village roads, maintain ferries, and put down tube-wells and aid
schools. Some unions did. Others did little more than pay the
chaukidars (sometimes dignified with the name of ‘rural police’).
Their activities were supervised, and their accounts checked
by a Circle Officer (usually a sub-deputy collector). Visits to
the Union Board, and its President were always a pleasant part
of country touring, and we did what we could to put some
confidence in the Presidents. In much of Bengal, the Union
Boards became a real part of the administration. My belief is
that the Union Boards brought an element into the countryside
that had been lacking in Permanently Settled Bengal—a closer
link between Collector, Sub-Divisional Officer and the rural
population. Sasmal, being in an ‘anti’ frame of mind, chose
to oppose the introduction of institutions that would improve
the link, and perhaps undermine the Mahisya way of doing
things. There were still no Union Boards in much of the
district in my day—certainly not in the Mahisya dominated
areas. We still relied upon the Government appointed ‘Pancha-
yets’ to collect the chaukidari tax. It must be said that the
Mahisyas were, in my view, an intelligent and self-controlled
lot. When meeting groups of them during ‘relief’ days, they
would behave in an orderly manner, and spokesmen would get
up on their behalf and argue reasonably.
PEASANT MOBILIZATION 237

“I should be surprised if the Mahisya peasants suffered any

reprisals in 1922.
“I agree with most of your analysis of political events. The
provincial council of the ‘provincial dyarchy’ period under the
Montagu-Chelmsford constitution of the 1919 Act, was much
more pro-landlord than that produced by the 1935 Government
of India Act, which brought Fazlul Huq in as Premier from
1st April 1937. Bengal in the 1920s was pretty prosperous.
The price of jute was high in relation to that of paddy. I re¬
member that in the jute growing areas round Gaibandha in
the Rangpur district, and in the Mymensingh district where I
had been S.D.O. in Tangail in 1933, there were numerous
‘Jotedars Banks’ round the small towns. (The Rangpur district
or parts of it, also had a good cash crop in tobacco.) There
was plenty of money about the Bengal countryside up-till
about 1929. Then of course there was the terrible break in
prices. In the later 1930s—even a little before the outbreak of
war. prices began to harden, and there were signs of prosperity
—such as the organisation of sight-seeing trips by rail to
Calcutta. We in the Civil Service, always reckoned ourselves
to be on the side of the peasant, and were pleased to see this
result of re-armament and in the first years of the war, the
collection of rent became much easier. Meanwhile, I think
that with the increase of population after the First War, there
mast have been an increase of landlessness. You may have
been able to study this, and I am not as well informed as I
should be. When I got back into district administration in
East Bengal during the war (Bakarganj and Dacca districts)
my tour enquiries suggested that the sharecroppers or barga-
dars were worse off than these adhiars I had found in Dinajpur
(by Bengal standards a rather lightly inhabited distiict). I have
no doubt that the bigger peasants, who had a surplus of paddy,
did very well just before, and for much of the war. The Bengali
equivalent of the ‘kulaks’ the people whom Stalin did not like
and the people who did best, if my historical recollection is
right, out of the French revolution.
“You imply that conversion of produce rents into cash rents
was a feature of the first 30 years of this century. I question
this. It is my belief that cash rents were usual well back in
the 19th century.
238 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

“On the same page you refer to the amortisation of debts.

This, with the institution of Debt Settlement Boards started
before the Huq Ministry came into office in 1937. I think it is
fair to say that the initiatives came from Aziz Ahmed (now
Secretary General or something under Bhutto’s Government
in Pakistan), a Punjabi serving in the I.C S. in Bengal, as
S.D O. of Chandpur, supported by his Collector of Tippera
who wasA.E. Porter. The idea was developed by the Govern¬
ment in operation in 1933 or ’34.
“Of the 1943 Famine victims, you say “a majority died on
the streets of Calcutta.” I have not got a copy of the Wood-
head Famine Commission Report, and I cannot recollect just
what was said, but I believe that though too many did die in
Calcutta, they were mostly from the adjoining areas such as 24
Parganas, Howrah, and even Midnapore. I think more died
quietly in their villages. I believe that East Bengal with its
very dense population suffered more than the West (Midna¬
pore with its cyclone in October 1942 was a special case).
“You refer to the ‘Tribals’. If you refer to such as Santhals,
Oraons, and Mundas, the fact is that except in the areas im¬
mediately adjacent to Chota Nagpur (parts of Midnapore,
Birbhum and Bankura), these people were recent imnrgrants.
In Dinajpur, there had been very few in the first census of
1872. They flocked in to cultivate unused land, and to work
as adhiars where already cultivated, particularly in the years up-
till 1911—and they continued in a lesser degree. I do not
believe that their land had been ‘stolen’ to any extent, though
like everywhere else, the foolish and improvident could lose
land to the prudent who lent him money. I do not think there
was much dishonouring of their women. The Santhals and the
like were well able to look after themselves.”

Sunil Kumar Sen to author, 27 February 1975

“I have read your paper with great interest. It will shatter

the model which some of us have tried to build. In fact, I find
it difficult to refute your contention. Here are some comments.
•‘Of the Tebhaga movement you. write: ‘Lack of support
from the Muslims & caste Hindus ensured the collapse. . .
The caste Hindus, who comprised a minority among the
PRESENT MOBILIZATION 239

peasants, did support the movement, although they did not

come to the forefront.
“Same page: 'prominent peasant participants killed’. The
most prominent peasant activists or cadres of the Kisan Sabha
successfully evaded police hunt; of the 33 peasants killed in
Dinajpur, only 6 were cadres, the rest were ordinary peasants
who had just joined the movement.
“I think that the nationalist movement made a great impact
on the peasants. Satyagraha or non-violent demonstrations
became the form; and little was done to lead them into agrarian
revolution (as in China, for instance, in the 1930s). The
Tebhaga was organized not by the Congress, but by the Com¬
munists. It hardly received help from industrial workers and
urban middle classes. After the Calcutta Killings in August
1946, the labour movement was in a shambles. As you have
repeatedly said, the urban bhadraloks had a stake in the status
quo. Alone the peasants fought and lost the battle. Peasants
revolt, to be successful, has to rely on the support of other
classes.
“In the post-independence period the affluent peasants
(owning about 5 to 10 acres) have benefited from agrarian
reforms and cooperatives and rural development programme.
They are not likely to rise in revolt. The tribal peasants are
the most oppressed section. In the last para of your paper
you’ve brilliantly explained their tragedy.”
 11

The Rural Parvenu:

A Report of Research in Progress

In the half century before 1914 India’s transport and com¬

munications systems were transformed. The postal service
was expanded to cover all but the remotest regions. The
electric telegraph linked even secondary centres of adminis¬
tration and commerce. The construction of 35,000 miles of
railway, the improvement of the trunk roads and the addition
of feeder roads effected a dramatic improvement in the ease
of travel and the carriage of goods. In many places the railways
caused major realignments of trade routes and market centres.
Many of India’s most thriving towns of the second decade of
the twentieth century had been little more than villages when
Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India.
At the same time the British port cities, Calcutta, Bombay
and Madras, were enabled to extend their hinterlands. To
those hinterlands they provided the economic stimulus of
burgeoning urban markets, and, by steamship through the
newlj-opened Suez Canal, more direct access to and from the
factories of Europe and the Americas. New cash crops were
introduced, some cultivated in plantations, and mills to pro¬
cess the crops were built at the ports and rail junctions. Steam
gave the power for manufacture and locomotion, and the
mining of the coal from which it was produced brought India.
THE RURAL PARVENU 241

another profitable industry. The mining of minerals followed.

Down the railways from the poorest agricultural areas came
labour to work the plantations, mills and mines, and to man
the construction gangs in the new towns.
Accompanying these developments in transport, communi¬
cations and urbanisation—facilitating them and at the same
time facilitated by them—was an expansion of government
bureaucracy: the growth of a more complex secretariat and
legal structure in the capitals, and the spread of offices, Triffid-
like, to a host of budding divisional, district and sub-divisional
towns. India acquired the paraphernalia of the modern pro¬
fessions, with high schools and colleges to furnish recruits.
There was another migration of labour along the railways, from
a different social class.
It is now conventional wisdom to observe that these late
nineteenth, and early twentieth-century developments had a
fundamental impact on Indian society, and that the decades
after the first world war cannot be understood without reference
to them. Yet it is remarkable how shallow is our knowledge
of the consequent social changes. With few exceptions the
existing studies are confined to the great metropolitan centres,
leaving rural and small-town society almost totally neglected.
It was there that the overwhelming mass of India’s people
lived, and, judging from the political and social movements of
the 1920s and 1930s, it was amongst that population that
great changes were being wrought.
It is regrettably easy to frame straightforward questions
concerning the social and economic consequences of the build¬
ing of the railways, the growth of new towns, the development;
of commercial agriculture and industry, the migration of
labour and the expansion of governmental institutions, to which
as yet we have no clear answers. Consider, for example, the
field of entrepreneurship. What new opportunities were there
for economic enterprise, and who took advantage of them?
On what capital and skills did the enterprising draw, and
what organisational models did they use? Of what significance
to their enterprise were the expanded institutions of adminis¬
tration and law? How did those who were successful reinvest
their wealth? Did they attempt to convert wealth to political
power? Where the entrepreneurs involved with voluntary
242 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

associations, or, as the latter developed, local self-government?

Where did they choose to live, and what life-styles did they
adopt? What ambitions did they have for their children, and
in what education and marriages were those ambitions reflected?
How did they—ns innovators—view their social role, and how
—as parvenus—were they viewed by others?
It is through this particular set of questions that my present
research approaches the subject of change in rural and small¬
town society. It will be observed that although my primary
interest is in entrepreneurship, I am also concerned with wider
issues: the scope for social mobility of the economically success¬
ful; the impact on politics of new wealth; and the extent of the
reappraisal of cultural values. The reader must be warned not
to expect comprehensive answers. The study is confined to one
Indian sub-region—five contiguous districts of West Bengal and
southern Bihar—and within that region it follows the fortunes
of one Bengali extended family through five generations. For
this family and its associates, I shall have answers to the ques¬
tions posed above. From the fascinating story of their rise
from the peasantry to affluence and power, there is much to be
learnt about the processes of change in rural India in the cen¬
tury 1850-1950. It is a significant story but no claim can be
made that it is typical, for as yet we have too few detailed local
studies to know what was typical or atypical. Herein lies one
justification for this research. It may serve as an example for
other studies of individuals, families, firms, institutions, or
localities, which together will enable us to frame satisfactory
generalisations about changing rural society.

The Sahanas of Suripushkarini

“Amongst the peasantry of Western Bengal there is not a

braver nor a more independent class than the Ugra-Kshatriyas,
or Aguris, the caste of which our hero was a member. Some¬
what fairer in complexion than Bengal peasants in general,
better-built, and more muscular in their corporeal forms, they
are known to be a bold and somewhat fierce race, and less
patient of any injustice or oppression than the ordinary Bengali
raiyat, who is content quietly to submit, even without a protest,
to any amount of kicking. The phrase Agurir gonar, or the
THE RURAL PARVANU 243

‘Aguri bully’, which has passed into a proverb, indicates that

the Aguris are, in the estimation of their countrymen, a hot-
blooded class . . .”1
The heroes of my tale, the Sahana family, like the hero of
Lai Behari Day’s, are Ugra Kshatriyas, and their ancestral
village, Kendur, is in Burdwan district not far from Day’s
“Kanchanpur”. According to the family’s oral tradition, it
was their reputation as “a bold and somewhat fierce race” that
earned for one of their ancestors, Tula Ram Sahana, an invita¬
tion in the mid-eighteenth century from the Malta Rajas of
Vishnupur to settle in that kingdom and assist in its defence
against marauding Marathas and Pindaris. Tula Ram’s reward
was a rent-free holding of excellent paddy land in Suripush-
karini, some five miles south of the Damodar River. The family
still farms this land, now in Indas Thana, Vishnupur Subdivision,
Bankura district.
Our first documentary acquaintance with the Sahanas comes
a century later when Tula Ram’s grandson, Bhagirat, falls foul
of the courts of law of the East India Company, successor to
the authority of the Vishnupur Raj, for behaviour befitting only
an Agurir gonar. In 1846 he was convicted by the munsif of
Indas for abetting a local landlord in oppression of raiyats in
Suripushkarini and neighbouring villages by cutting and carry¬
ing off their paddy.2 This was undoubtedly entrepreneurship of
a kind, but it was left to Bhagirat Sahana’ son, Gosain Das, to
point the family to more legitimate enterprise. In his mid-20s
at the time of his father’s brush w'ith the law, he went to
Salkhia on the Hooghly near Calcutta, where he became an
assistant to a Hindustani merchant trading in timber from
Nepal. There Gosain learnt Hindi, accounting, and the practi¬
calities of business. Apparently an apt pupil, he was soon
trading in timber on his own account and investing his profits
in land in Belur, a few miles up-river. In 1860 he also opened
a shop in the bazar in Raniganj, the terminus of the East
Indian Railway’s newline from Howrah. He died just three
years later, leaving his business to his young son, Prankrishna,
aged 17.
xLal Behari Day: Bengal Preasant Life, (London, 1906), p. 278.
2Decisions of the Ziltah Courts, Lower Provinces, November 1846 (no
place or date of publication given), pp. 77-80.
 244 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Prankrishna had to manage the family lands at Suripush-

karini, 50 miles to the south-east, as well as the shop at
Raniganj. He therefore handed the shop over to his brother,
Rajkrishna, eleven years his junior, as soon as he was old
enough to take the responsibility. Raniganj was well situated
for trade. It had the rail link to Calcutta. It was connected to
Burdwan and to the towns of Chota Nagpur by the Grand
Trunk Road. By ferry across the Damodar and bullock-cart
track it was possible to reach Bankura, 30 miles to the south.
Moreover, it lay on the eastern edge of the great Gondwana
coal and mineral field, then in the early stages of development.
Rajkrishna expanded the original business of trade in cereals
and oils into bullock-cart contracting, timber dealing and coal
haulage.
Meanwhile the East Indian Railway had been extended into
and through Chota Nagpur. In 1882 Rajkrishna went up the
railway to Giridih, the terminus of a branch line in Hazaribagh
district, and, displaying the same enterprise as had his father
before him, he turned his hand to a variety of profitable ven¬
tures: shopkeeping, money-lending, warehousing, road and
building contracting for the government, and, most important
of all, mica mining. He arrived just as the mica fields were
being opened up, and was one of the first ten or a dozen adven¬
turous men to take up mining leases It is interesting to note
that, apart from a few Europeans, almost all the early entre¬
preneurs in this field were Bengalis.3
The elder brother, Prankrishna Sahana, continued to devote
most of his energies to the Indas Thana lands, to which he was
steadily adding, and to the exceedingly profitable sideline of
loaning money and paddy on interest to the local cultivators.
By the mid-1890s, with three collieries in the new Jharia field
in Manbhum district added to his dozen or more active mica
mines at Kodarma in Hazaribagh district and his stores at

3Mica leases granted by the Government of Bengal between 1881-1908,

with the dates and names of the lessees, are listed in the Consolidated
Alphabetical Index to Proceedings, Government of Bengal, Revenue
Department, Lard Revenue Branch, 1861-1908, vol. 1. Further details
of mines and their lessees, 1886-1892, are given in Government of Bengal.
Revenue Department, Land Revenue Branch, file 6M-5(1), proceedings
A85-98, August 1895.
 THE RURAL PARVANU 245

Giridih and Raniganj, Rajkrishna had increasingly to delegate

control. Most of his managers were drawn from amongst his
relatives and other caste-fellows; others were trusted family
servants promoted to higher positions of responsibility. For
example, a cook, Sasi Bhusan Bandhopadhyay, became one of
his most successful colliery managers, and, after his death, a
major family rival in the coal industry.4
Rajkrishna had five sons, but none was yet old enough to
take a hand in the business. Prankrishna had only one son,
Satya Kinkar Sahana, born in 1874. He had completed his BA
in Calcutta, and was studying for an MA and BL when the
family recalled him to Giridih to assist Rajkrishna. He had
just ten years’ experience when his father and uncle died
within a few hours of each other in 1908. Satya Kinkar now
took sole charge of the joint family’s affairs. He was a method¬
ical man, who kept a careful written record of the condition of
the family’s enterprises, and meticulously planned his economic
moves. He appreciated that the law courts, correctly used,
could be an instrument of economic aggression. In the follow¬
ing ten years we see him systematically instituting law cases to
counter competitors in the mica and coal industries, and to
gain control of mortgaged properties. His most spectacular
coup was a Privy Council decision in 1927 against the Marwari
mica entrepreneurs, the Rajgharias, which gave him almost a
lakh of rupees as the return on a loan of Rs. 12,000 made by
Rajkrishna in 1907.5
Satya Kinkar’s steadfast principle of reinvestment was to
acquire land, either by foreclosing on mortgages or by purchas¬
ing outright. He bought limited amounts in Chota Nagpur,
but the bulk of his land acquisitions were in Bankura and
Burdwan district of West Bengal. In 1917 he decided to move
his headquarters to Bankura town, by then linked directly by
broad-gauge railway to the coal fields in Manbhum, and by the

4This rivalry produced a number of Jaw suits. See Sasi Bhusan

Bandhopadhyay v. Karuna Kinkar Sahana, Calcutta High Court Second
Appeal No. 2838 of 1910; and Karuna Kinkar Sahana v. Sasi Bhusan
Bandhopadhyay, Hazaribagh Subordinate Judge’s Court Suit No. 145
of 1910.
5Patna High Court First Appeal No. 212 of 1920; Privy Council
Appeal No. 3 of 1925.
246 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

newly opened Bankura Damodar River narrow-gauge line to

Indas and Burdwan. It also offered the advantage of the
Wesleyan Mission College, where Satya Kinkar could arrange
for the education of his six sons, the oldest of whom was then
17. He bought a large house and about 40 acres of land on the
southern edge of the town.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Satya Kinkar Sahana conti¬
nued his land purchases. As his young cousins—Rajkrishna’s
boys—and his own sons grew to manhood, he also leased new
mica and coal properties, and bought three large rice mills,
two in Bankura town and one in Burdwan. Each of the sons
was given a college education, and three took professional
degrees (in mining engineering, law and medicine), but all
devoted their subsequent energies to the family businesses and
estates.
Once Satya Kinkar had settled at Bankura, and particularly
as his consins and older sons took increasing responsibility for
the business, he was able to turn his attention to politics,
social service and, above all else, literature, a passion since
his youth.6 He became a prominent figure in the district. He
served on the managing committees of the Mission College,
the Ramakrishna Math, the District Agricultural Association,
and the BDR Railway. He was a municipal commissioner and
an honorary magistrate. He was elected as an independent to
the Bengal Legislative Council in 1930 and served two terms
totalling seven years. It was in this period that he was honour¬
ed with the title Rai Bahadur. His defeat by a Congressman
in the 1936 elections, which he greatly resented, was a factor
in his later support for the Hindu Mahasabha.
Of all his activities, Satya Kinkar himself set greatest store
by his writing. He was a frequent contributor of articles on
religious, social and political topics to local and Calcutta
journals. He also wrote verse, but like so many other poets he
found that the editors of literary magazines rarely appreciated
the true merit of his work. He added his voice to the then
lively debate over the birthplace of Candidas, supporting
(need I add?) the school which gave the medieval Vaisnava

6On this period of his life I have written at more length in chapt. 7
of the present volume.
THE RURAL PARVENU 247

poet a Bankura locale.' Satya Kinkar’s proudest moment

came when Sanskrit College, Calcutta, decided to confer upon
him a Vidyavinode. He received the award not long before
his death in October 1960.

The Sources

These are the bare bones of the Sahana family story. What
historical sources are available to give it flesh?
The most important—perhaps exceptional—documents are
the papers of the Sahana family itself. Dating from 1900, these
have been preserved by Satya Kinkar and his sons. They
comprise land deeds, rent rolls, lists of mortgages, legal case
files, wills, joint family agreements and partition documents,
mining and trade accounts, company registration papers,
minutes of the meetings of boards of directors, correspondence,
horoscopes, household accounts, and Satya Kinkar’s priceless
personal diaries, 45 volumes in all. These papers are kept
in the fine library at “Ananda Kutir”, the family home at
Bankura, where is also to be found a complete set of Satya
Kinkar’s publications.8 There are a number of short accounts
of the Sahana family’s history, published9 and in manuscript,
and similar narratives are available for some other families in
the locality.10 Genealogies and oral traditions are well preserv¬
ed in the region (documentary verification, where available, has
revealed a remarkably high level of accuracy), and this has
made interviewing extraordinarily profitable.
Apart from the Sahana family materials, no other relevant
private papers have yet been found in the district towns, but
the cities have brought better luck. Jadavpur University,
Calcutta, holds the diaries and other papers of Hemendra

7S.K. Sanaha: Candidasa Prasanga, (Calcutta, 1959).

8I am deeply indebted to the Sahana family for giving me access to
these papers, and particularly to Paresh Bijoy Sahana for assisting me
in innumerable ways.
9Jnanendranath Kumar: Bangsha Paricai, (Calcutta, 1932), vol. XII,
pp. 77-106; and Paresh Bijoy Sahana: Rai Bahadur Satya Kinkar
Sahana Vidyavinode Mahasair Sangsipta Jiban Brittanta, (Bankara,
1960).
10E.g. Shashanka Shekhar Banerjee: Shanbanda Gramer Itibritta,
(Bankura, 1941).
248 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Prasad Ghose, Calcutta journalist and Hindu Mahasabhite,

whose home district was Bankura. At the Nehru Memorial
Library in New Delhi the papers of Sir Bijoy Prasad Singh Roy
are available. He was a member of large zamindari family of
Chakdighi, Burdwan district, and in the 1930s held the port¬
folios of local self-government and revenue in the Government
of Bengal. Satya Kinkar Sahana had contacts with both Ghose
and Singh Roy during his Legislative Council years.
Some of the most revealing insights into economic relation¬
ships are to be gained from law court records at all levels: the
high courts in Calcutta and Patna; the district courts, and their
mid-nineteenth-century predecessors, the zillah courts;11 and
the sub-divisional munsifs’ courts. The idea, if not the practice,
of using court records for historical research is in vogue,
and therefore a word of caution may not go amiss. The only
available form of indexing is the annual registers, where the
cases are listed by date of institution, and the names of the
parties given, often with their places of residence. If one is not
to flounder helplessly amid the thousands of cases instituted
each year, one must go in search of the names of particular
individuals, or, at the very least, specific localities. Obviously
this requires a degree of familiarity with one's research topic,
and even then the labour is immense. If one has courage,
patience and the self-control to cry only inwardly at the mal¬
treatment and neglect suffered by the registers in the hands of
the mistitled Keepers of Records, the rewards can be high.
Government archives at the state level are relatively well
preserved and more readily accessible because of their depart¬
mental organisation and subject indexing. For the study of local
economic development, the Board of Revenue and Public
Works Department records are important, but in West Bengal
and Bihar these are not held in the state archives. Access has
to be sought separately.
The district collectorate records are also invaluable, but, as
in most places they have never been the object of historical
research, the physical problem of disinterring them is greater.
The range of records selected for permanent preservation is

^Decisions of the Zillah Courts, Lower Provinces. May 1846-March

1857, are held in the National Library of India, Calcutta.
 THE RURAL PARVENU 249

also less broad at the district than at the state level, at least in
West Bengal.12 In this respect the term “collectorate” is signi¬
ficant, for it is primarily materials concerning land revenue that
have been retained. Tom Kessinger has discussed very ably the
historical evidence on village social structure available in the
revenue papers,13 but it must be noted that his examples were
from the Punjab, where there were patvaris updating the records
of land ownership and tenancy rights every year. The student
of permanently-settled Bengal will be sorely disappointed if he
goes to the district collectorate expecting a similar wealth of
regularly revised data. From the late eighteenth to the late
nineteenth century there was no survey and settlement in Bengal,
and most districts had to wait until well into this century. The
Bankura survey and settlement, for instance, was not completed
until 1924,14 and it was 1960 before there was a revision.
Having said as much, I must hasten to add that the record of
rights and accompanying land revenue materials in Bengal are
an intricate and rich mine of data on rural society and its
twentieth-century development. It is a source that has as yet
been scarcely broached. Also at the district level, local self-
governing bodies (such as municipalities, district and local
boards, transport authorities, cooperative banks) have records,
in varying states of disarray.
Government publications are almost as rewarding as the
manuscript records, and the state secretariat libraries hold
complete sets. Here are the gazetteers, census reports, legis¬
lative proceedings, settlement reports, civil lists, the evidence

12I was particularly disappointed to discover that the tour diaries of

settlement officers and district magistrates have been destroyed. What a
rich source of social data these can be judged from the tour
diaries, 1932-1947, of Frank Owen Bell, ICS, India Office Library,
London, MSS EUR. D. 733, and reel No. 2370. [Subsequently, I have
learnt that there are tour diaries preserved in some West Bengal District
Magistrates’ residences, rather than the District Collectorate Record
Rooms.]
1?Tcm. S. Kessinger: ‘‘Historical Materials cn Rural India’’, Indian
Economic and Social History Review, vol. VII, no. 4, December 1970,
pp. 489-510. Kessingar includes a useful listing to other recent articles
on rural source materials.
44F.W. Robertson: Final Roport on the Survey and Settlement
Operations in the District of Bankura, 1917-1924, (Calcutta, 1926).
250 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

of commissions of enquiry, and the findings of officers on

special delegation. For this region of eastern India, encompass¬
ing the mining belt, the Memoirs of the Geological Survey of
India have proved useful, as have the United States consular
dispatches from Calcutta held in the National Archives,
Washington, D.C.,15 which contain important information on
the Indian mica trade.
Even in districts with a reputation for “backwardness”, like
Bankura and Hazaribagh, numerous voluntary associations have
existed throughout the past century. The range is wide. We
find business organisations like the Kodarma Mica Mining
Association, the Bankura Agriculture Association, and the
Mukhtars’ Bar Association; religious societies such as the
Brahmo Samaj of Hazaribagh and the Ramakrishna Mission of
Bankura; social service organisations such as the Bankura
Sammilani, and cultural clubs like the Vishnupur Sahitya
Parisad; caste sabhas such as the Ugra Kshatriya Samaj and the
Scheduled Caste Association; and, of course, political party
branches. Regrettably few have preserved minute books or other
manuscript documents, but for most the occasional printed
reports and membership lists can be unearthed in local libraries
or by enquiries from former office holders. Accounts of asso¬
ciation activities are also carried in local periodicals, and a
heartening number of these have been recovered.
One exception to the rule about the failure of institutions to
preserve manuscript records is the British Methodist Mission,
which with its predecessor the Wesleyan Mission, has been
engaged in evangelical, educational, medical and social welfare
work in Bankura district for a full century. At the Methodist
Missionary Society in London the correspondence to and from
the workers in the field is preserved, providing a distinctive
viewpoint on social change in the area. Professors at Bankura
Christian College, in particular, were intimately involved in the
life of the district, and it is our good fortune that one, Cyril
F. Ball, kept correspondence and diaries for almost the full
25 years (1924-1948)during which he served in the district.
Another, Wesley Culshaw, became an authority on Santali

15These are available on microfilm for the years 1843-1906 (US

National Archives microcopy T-189).
THE RURAL PARVENU 251

culture and language, and his book Tribal Heritage16 is an

important document of tribal life in Bankura. For some years
immediately before and after the First World War, the more
famous Edward J. Thompson also taught at the college, and a
number of his novels are set in Bankura. For instance, all the
major characters in An Indian Day (London, 1927) are modelled
on the men and women with whom he was associated there,
Shashanka Shekhar Banerjee, Professor of Philosophy, ran a
small commercial press as a sideline, publishing a monthly
periodical, Lakshmi, in the 1920s, and with his own pen chron¬
icling the development of the district. Among other things he
has left a brief history of his village,17 and his Bankura Saharer
Gorar Katha (The Story of the Origins of Bankura Town) is the
only sustained account of the growth of the district head¬
quarters.18
Given such largesse, it might seem greedy to ask for more—
but in this case there is more. In 1874, the year in which Satya
Kinkar Sahana was born into an Ugra Kshatriya village family,
Lai Behari Day published his Govinda Sanxanta or the History
of Bengal Peasant (later retitled Bengal Peasant Life) from which
there was a quotation earlier in this article. Although cast in
the form of a novel, it was a factual sociological study, more
detailed than any other available in India for that period, of an
Ugra Kshatriya peasant family. Day sketched with care the life
of his own Burdwan village, and his work was the inspiration
for the rural sociologists of Sriniketan to return to the same
village in 1933 and 1956 to study the changes that had occurred
in 60 to 80 years.19 For the historian of the Sahana family.
Day and his successors have provided the perfect backdrop to
this story of the rural parvenu.

16W.J. Culshaw: Tribal Heritage: A Study of the Santals, (London,

1949).
17Shashanka Shekhar Banerjee- Shanbanda Gramer Itibritta,
(Bankura, 1941).
“Published serially in the Bankura Bengali monthly Hindubani,
October 1964-May 1965.
“Tara Krishna Basu: Lai Behari Day's “Kanchanpur" Revisited,
(Bombay, 1958), and The Bengal Peasant from Time to Time, (Bombay,
1962).
252 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

The Enterprising Bengali

Where is the research leading? At this stage I can indicate

only the major directions, and suggest some profitable areas for
further work.
I intend to call my study ‘‘The Enterprising Bengali” to
signal my rejection of what I regard as the myth of Bengali
entrepreneurial incompetence. The “failure” of Bengalis to
match the commercial and industrial enterprise of the British
and Marwaris in Bengal in the century 1850-1950 is considered
so axiomatic that it is not to the question “whether?”, but to
the question “why?”, that almost all contemporary scholarship
is addressed.20 Significantly, most of that scholarship is con¬
fined to Calcutta, or, when rural enterprise is studied, it is
industries producing for export—like indigo, jute and tea—
that are examined. I would not contest the fact that in Calcutta
non-Bengalis have dominated many sectors of the economy,
particularly the foreign import-export sectors, but Calcutta is

20“The most important lines of business at present are under the

control of non-Bengalis. They came here on foot even before the con¬
struction of the railways, and today it is not only in Calcutta but in
every important river port and business centre, and even in remote
villages, that they are defeating the Bengalis and establishing themselves.
What is the cause of all this? Is it not an index of our extreme idleness
and inefficiency?” Prafulla Chandra Ray: Annasamasyay Bangalar
Parajay O Tahar Pratikar (Bengal’s Failure With the Food Problem
And Its Remedy), (Calcutta, n.d.), p. 106. The famous chemist’s criti¬
cism of his fellow Bengalis in the 1930s is still widely quoted, and seems
to have set the tone for later commentators. E.g. see N.K. Sinha,
“Indian Business Enterprise: Its Failure in Calcutta, 1800-1848”, Bengal
Past and Present, vol. LXXXVI, Pt. II, no. 162, July-December, 1967,
pp. 112-123; and The Economic History of Bengal, 1793-1848, (Calcutta,
1970): Blair B. Kling, ‘‘Entrepreneurship and Regional Identity in
Bengal”, Bengal; Regional Identity, (ed. David Kopf, East Lansing,
1969), pD. 75-84; Thomas A. Timberg, Industrial Entrepreneurship Among
the Trading Communities of India; How the Pattern Differs, (Cambridge,
Mass., 1969); and “A Study of a ‘Great’ Marwari Firm, 1860-1914”,
Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. VIII, no. 3, September,
1971, pp. 264-283; Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ‘‘European and Indian Entre¬
preneurship in India, 1900-1930”, Elites in South Asia, (ed. Edmund
Leach and S.N. Mukherjee, Cambridge, 1970), pp. 223-256; Sunil Kumar
Sen, Studies in Economic Policy and Development of India, 1848-1939,
(Calcutta, second edition, 1972).
THE RURAL PARVENU 253

not all of Bengal and international trade is not the only field
for entrepreneurship. If we look away from Calcutta to rural
and small-town Bengal, and beyond to the neighbouring pro¬
vinces of Orissa, Bihar, Assam and Burma, we find that
Bengalis have been busily and successfully engaged in a variety
of economic ventures.
Rather than interpreting the relative absence of Bengali
capital in Calcutta as an indication of entrepreneurial failure,
we should recognise that Bengalis were responding in the second
half of the nineteenth century to the profitable opportunities
for investment which the application of new technologies and
the opening of new markets were generating in the hinterland.
Among other things, Bengal’s agricultural “frontier” was
expanding in that half-century. The topography of the region
has always hindered easy communications; its shifting river
courses, treacherous climate and debilitating endemic diseases
caused repeated local fluctuations in population densities and
agricultural productivity. This meant that, even into the early
years of the present century, there remained underutilised areas
of Bengal and its fringe—most notably the Terai, the chars
along the Brahmaputra, the Sunderbans, and the sal jungles of
the Chota Nagpur plateau—which were available for economic
enterprise as transport, agricultural and health technologies
were improved.
I contend that a rational calculation of economic profit
encouraged many Bengalis, of castes high and low, to engage in
mufussil capital investment, and that the economic returns
were reinforced by political and social gains associated with
control over land, of the people who worked the land, and of
the distribution of the products of farms, forests and mines. The
evidence, I believe, contradicts the widely held proposition (as
expressed by N.K. Sinha) that “The tendency towards accumu¬
lation of wealth which might lead to capitalism—commercial
or industrial—which we notice in the case of the Marwaris,
Bhatias, Chettiars, Khojas and Borahs, was not there in Bengal.
Indigenous entrepreneurship could not develop in such an un¬
congenial environment.”21
What degree of economic development was achieved by

21N.K. Sinha, op cit., p. 122.

254 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

Bengali enterprise is an equally important—but separable—

question. With regard to agriculture, I think the currently
accepted interpretation is correct: the nature of the land tenure
system, with its strong incentives to speculate in rents rather
than to invest in land and crop improvement, despressed agri¬
cultural development.22 Gustav Papanek in his study of the
Pakistani economy has spoken of “the social utility of greed”.23
In the Bengal case we must rather recognise the high social
costs of greed. Rackrenting and money-lending at extortionate
rates of interest drained away what little capital surplus the
occupancy raiyats had for reinvestment in their land, and
reduced vast numbers to the chronically insecure position of
sharecroppers or landless labourers. Grain hoarding to facili¬
tate price manipulations in the recurrent times of scarcity
swelled the numbers of those who died from starvation, as also
the ranks of the half-alive, permanently enfeebled from malnu¬
trition. The opening of the new lands in West Bengal and
Chota Nagpur was accomplished at the price of the dispossession
of the tribals, and the destruction of their society and cultures.
For the mines, these same uprooted tribals provided a cheap
and easily exploitable source of labour, and a provincial legis¬
lature dominated by landlord and commercial interests saw
little advantage in providing the workers with protection
against the health hazards of the primitive pits in which they
were forced to labour.
Among sociologists and development economists there is
no longer a universal insistence upon the need for the dis¬
integration of the extended family and traditional communal
ties as a prerequisite of successful entrepreneurship, but it
may still be useful to note that in the present case these
“traditional” structures appear to have been the very basis of

2"I am indebted to Dr. Binay Bhusan Chaudhuri, University of

Calcutta, for shaiing with me the findings of his research in this field.
See his Agrarian Economy and Agrarian Relations in Bengal, 1859-1885,
(Oxford University doctoral dissertation, 1968), and subsequent articles
in Bengal Past and Present, vol. LXXXVIII, pt. I, no. 165, July-Decem-
ber 1969, pp. 152-206; and Indian Economic and Social History Review,
vol. VI, no 3, September, 1969, pp. 203-257; vol. VII, no. 1, March
1970, pp. 25-60; and vol. VII, no. 2, June, 1970, pp. 311-251.
23G. Papanek: Pakistan’s Development; Social Goals and Private
Incentives, (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).
THE RURAL PARVENU 255

successful enterprise. The family lands were the original

source of capital for investment in non-agricultural ventures.
Brothers and cousins provided the necessary manpower for
the initial diversification of enterprise, while from more distant
kinsmen and caste-fellows came commercial intelligence, busi¬
ness introductions and access to markets. When the scale of
enterprise necessitated the delegation of executive responsibi¬
lity, kinsmen and family dependants again were recruited.
Through the education of sons, new ‘‘modern” skills were
added to the resource pool, while through strategic marriages
of both sons and daughters (all within the caste) valuable
commercial and political links were forged.
What we must not lose sight of is the parallel adaptation
of “caste” to meet modern demands, most notably through
caste association. The Ugra Kshatriya Samaj, a voluntary,
subscription association with formally elected office-bearers
and its own intermittently published journal,24 exerted its
efforts to redefine and expand the jati through the abolition of
endogamous sub-groups. Kshatriya status was claimed for
the Aguris, and propaganda for the purification of ritual prac¬
tices was undertaken among caste members. At the same
time they were urged to take advantage of modern educa¬
tional opportunities, public health programmes and agricultural
cooperatives. From the Samaj headquarters in Calcutta, those
who came to the capital might secure assistance in their
search for housing, admission to schools or colleges, introduc¬
tions to potential employers, contacts with caste-fellows
established in business or the professions, financial aid (when
the association coffers permitted) and social companionship.
With the introduction of elective institutions, the Samaj can¬
vassed for votes for Ugra Kshatriya candidates, urging the
caste to show its solidarity and enhance its power by withhold-

21I have been able to locate copies of Ugrakshatriya Pratinidhi,

published from Calcutta in the 1890s; and Ugrakshatriya Patrika, pub¬
lished from Calcutta from 1930 until the late 1950s. See also Hari
Charan Bandhu, Ugrakshatriya Tatwa, (Burdwan, 1893); Rajput O
Ugrakshatriya, (Burdwan, 1913); and The Origin of the Rajpoot Kshatri-
yas, (Burdwan, 1929). It may be noted that the Bangiya Sahitya Parisad
Library, Calcutta, has an extensive collection of caste association
periodicals.
256 MOSTLY ABOUT BENGAL

ing votes from non-Aguris.

Earlier I attributed the neglect of rural entrepreneurship to
an over-concentration on Calcutta b> modern historians of
Bengal, particularly those of us who write in English. It is
this same exclusive concern with the city that has made us
disregard the sustained importance in the minds and behav¬
iour of most Bengalis of local centres of greater antiquity and
sacredness. For the residents of Bankura district, for instance,
there was pride in the possession of Vishnupur, whose wide
tanks ruined fortifications, palaces and terracotta temples,,
silk-weavers, painters, potters and metal-smiths, numerous
brahmans, and still-famous school of vocal music, were the
legacy of a rajadom which for centuries had resisted invasion,,
protected Hinduism and patronised the traditional arts. For a
Mallabhum man to weigh such faded splendour against the
modern opportunities and comforts of Calcutta may seem
foolishly romantic, but there were many in the district (as in
districts throughout Bengal) for whom such traditions gave
rural life a richness which the city could not match. Calcutta
drew away many talented people, but there were others who
stayed in or returned to small-town society.
The model of a successful bhadralck career in the nine¬
teenth- and twentieth-century capital is one with which we are
familiar;25 but there were other, older models for the aspiring
Bengali. Writing of the hero of the late sixteenth-century
Candi-mangcila of Mukundarama, Edward Dimock and Ronald
Inden ha' e remarked that even with wealth he was not attract¬
ed by life in the capital city. “As a good Bengali Hindu, he
aspires to the role and status in society to which many good
Bengalis of his time apparently aspired (and perhaps still
aspire)—that of a local raja or zamindar. It is clear that the
ideal life, for a Bengali Hindu of means, lay neither in the
village nor in the capitals ... It lay in the urban centre of a
man’s own chiefdom”.26 The twentieth-century version of this

25See S.N. Mukherjee: “Class, Caste and Politics in Calcutta,

1815-1838”, Elites in South Asia; and J.H. Broomfield, Elite Conflicts in
a Plural Society: Twentieth-Century Bengal, (Berkeley, 1968). pp. 514.
26“The City in Pre-British Bengal according to the mangala-kavyas'\
Urban Bengal, (ed. Riehard L. Park, East Lansing, 1969), p. 7.
THE RURAL PARVENU 257

ideal was to possess an impressive bungalow in the district

headquarters town, and to control a patron-client network
extending into the surrounding countryside. Power and social
prestige still rested on the control of land and its cultivators.
The economic consequences of the persistence of such an
ideal are obvious: we may expect a preference for capital rein¬
vestment in land. There are important cultural, and possibly
political, consequences as well. For the nouveau riche it was
convenient that there should be a traditionally sanctioned role
and life-style for the high achiever in rural society. Although
many of these parvenus had prospered through an innovative
use of the newfangled railways and mines and of the legal and
administrative institutions of the British, we should not be
surprised to find them (from the comfort of their new rajbaris)
espousing the superior virtues of traditional village life, with
its well-ordered social structure, and standing forth as advo¬
cates of a Hindu revival. To the district towns this new class of
rural entrepreneurs brought wealth, and through their patron-
client networks the potential for new rural political organisa¬
tion. Further research will, I suspect reveal a connection
between these phenomena and that most significant of develop¬
ments in early twentieth-century Bengal politics: the reorienta¬
tion towards the mofussil towns of nationalist organisation
and recruitment in the years immediately following the First
World War.
V
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