According to David Gilmartin:
Punjab witnessed in 1947 the almost complete collapse of a mediatory political framework previously linking local communities culturally to a sense of regional collectivity. If there was a provincial “party of the soil” in the Punjab before partition, grounding communities and leaders in a provincial vision of territorial collectivity, it was the Unionist Party. Openly “Punjabi” in its cultural (if not linguistic) orientation, the Unionist Party had also seen itself as the provincial protector of local and “tribal” identities and influence. But the Unionist Party – and the principles it stood for – were anathematized by the Muslim League in the mid-1940s, and Punjabi identity (including the regional “tribal” and biradari
associations that helped to produce it) discredited as yet another form of amoral particularism.243
In contrast to Punjab, the Pakistan movement in Bengal could not discredit provincial visions of self and community quite in the same way. In this dissertation I have tried to show why this was the case:
Influential pirs were important to political parties vying to represent the Muslims in the electoral arena of Bengal. As the case of Pir Abu Bakr illustrates, since the 1920s, the sphere of influence of such pirs themselves came to be connected to their patronage of local, village-level tenant associations, which increasingly became staunch critics of landlordism. In stark contrast to the role of the landed pirs of Punjab, through whom rural hierarchy was maintained, in Bengal, many of the pirs even though they were patronized by the landed Muslim ashraf class, got linked to counter-hierarchical, anti-landlordist tendencies of rural society. Such counter-hierarchical tendencies were intensified by transformations in the composition, agenda, and rhetoric of the rural anjumans, which were key to disseminating visions of Muslim community where the display of rank,
243 David Gilmartin, ‘Pakistan, Partition, and South Asian History: In Search of a
wealth, and influence were seen as corruptions of Islamic community, and not the basis on which the community could be adequately represented, as had earlier been the case.
At another level, I have tried to show how a Muslim “improvement” ideology circulating in rural Bengal, in linking a notion of cultivation of Islamic moral community to the cultivation (tilling) of land, and the literature generated by the praja movement – which in latching on to the ethical impulses of the “improvement” discourse, expanded its meaning by tying conceptions of cultivating an Islamic self and community anchored in the value of labor to the soil of Bengal – created claims of ethnic belonging rooted in a regionalism, thereby forging Bengali Muslim identity at a grassroots level. This identity, forged in the crucible of the praja movement with a counter-hierarchical edge, made its way into the domain of provincial electoral politics in the 1930s; it came to be seen as the authentic basis of representing the Muslim community.
Such claims of ethnic belonging were also taken up and consolidated by the Muslim urban intelligentsia and littérateurs striving to carve out a space of literary- cultural autonomy and Muslim modernism in order to remedy the problem of Muslim cultural “backwardness”. A prominent ideological strand operating in this literary- cultural domain from the 1920s onward, as it engaged in the project of ushering in a Muslim modernism in Bengal, developed a conception of “Muslim culture” as inherently open, democratic, socialistic, redistributive, and committed to securing the interests of labor and individual self-expression. The cultural politics of Bengali Pakistanism, as it emerged in the early 1940s, was deeply impacted by this ideological strand. At one level, this enabled articulations of the Pakistan movement as a revolutionary people’s
values of redistribution. At another level, the demand for Pakistan was put forth as an aspiration for the realization of Bengali Muslim cultural autonomy and likened to movements such as the Irish Literary Revival. Since from their very early days, literary institutions centered in cities, such as the Bangiya Musalman Shahitya Samiti, involved in promoting this idea of Bengali Muslim cultural autonomy were engaged in validating it by merging the political affect mobilized against the then current colonial arrangement of proprietorship in land (Permanent Settlement) generated by the religiosity-infused
praja movement with an affective response against the arrangement (haal bandobasto) of Bengali literary language, the articulations of Pakistan as a state committed to
redistributive justice rooted in Islamic universalism as well as an idea of cultural self- determination rooted in regional particularity could co-exist seamlessly.
It is not that a style of self-expressionist politics – defining itself through an emphasis on the individual and a stress on anti-societalism – that was so central to the ideology of the Pakistan movement in Punjab and UP, as noted by Gilmartin and
Daeschel, was entirely absent in Bengal. Here, this self-expressionist politics developed through the somewhat opposed currents of Islamic reformism, on the one hand, and the unorthodox literary praxis of Nazrul Islam, on the other. While Nazrul’s unfettered individualism, without regard for religious or societal strictures, reveling in an anti-status quoist, revolutionary moment was one expression of this political mode, Islamic
reformist visions which placed premium on the capacity for individual judgment, separated from the spiritual-material hierarchies of society and rooted in an internal realm, influenced by scriptures, validated a less flamboyant, but equally individuated and
interiorized mode of being. Despite their differences, both the Islamic reformists and the likes of Nazrul Islam were united in their commitment to redistributive justice.
This figure of the enchanted individual as the fount of political and religious meaning, the source of commitment and judgment, endowed with an interiority and abstracted from society, that was produced in the course of the two decades preceding the Pakistan movement deeply impacted the urban cultural politics of the Pakistan movement in Bengal. Thus in the articulations of the urban cultural activists of the movement in Bengal, Pakistan was envisioned as a state where individuals abstracted from their moorings in social particularities of class, religion, and sect could come together as a nation through their commitment to an idea of a state rooted in redistributive justice. This enabled forging links with several non-Muslim communists (such as M.N Roy) in the sphere of cultural activism. This also explains why several left-minded members within the League continued to have friendly relations with Hindu leaders of the Communist Party in Bengal, even at the peak of the movement.244 As Abul Hashim, the General Secretary of the Muslim League in 1944, recounts, before the 1946 legislative elections, the League attempted to convince such Communist Party leaders to refrain from
contesting the Muslim League in any of the Muslim constituencies.245 Even though such an arrangement did not ultimately work out, that this was seen as a distinct possibility by Leaguers such as Hashim and Abul Mansur point to how strong the idea of Pakistan as a coming together of individuals, abstracted from socially generated identities and
committed to redistributive justice was. At the same time, for activists like Mansur and
244 Abul Hashim, In Retrospection (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 1974), p. 101. 245 Ibid., pp. 101-102.
Hashim, a commitment to universal justice and democracy – a vision of Pakistan where all individuals and communities would be accorded equal dignity and rights build on the redistribution of wealth – was rooted in the particularity of the “spirit of Islam”, and did not, in principal, require the erasure of this particularity but a realization of its nature. Yet this connection between Islam and socialism, which historically emerged through the urban intelligentsia’s appropriation of the specific labor-centric spin given to the Islamic theological discourse on riba by the improvement discourse circulating in the
countryside, points to how the energies of the “prepolitical” Muslim rural social domain continued to inflect the urban cultural politics of Bengali Pakistanism, as it validated itself as a non-parochial, non-communal, revolutionary people’s movement committed to fighting imperialist tendencies and establishing a state founded on redistributive justice.
GLOSSARY:
ahwab traditional arbitrary exaction in addition to formal rent levied by zamindars and other public officers
adhiar a person sharing half the crop with the landlord
alim man trained in religious sciences
amla a petty official
anjuman society, committee, association
ashraf a Muslim of respectable status
azadi freedom
bahas religious debate
bandobast settlement
barga sharecropping
bhadralok literally ‘respectable’ but used in historical discourse as an analytical category to imply a status group in Bengal who came from the upper caste; were economically dependent on landed rents and professional and clerical employment and kept a distance from the masses
bhag-chashi sharecropper
bidat innovation that goes against the Koran and the hadith
bigha a measure of land, 1/3 of an acre
biradari brotherhood, a community based on the model of common descent
char alleviated land, typically alluvial deposits created by the fluvial action of
rivers
chaukidar guard; village police
kutcherry office of a zamindar
din/deen faith, the Islamic religion
duniya world
fatwa generally written opinion on a point of Islamic law given by theologians or religious leaders
goshol ablutions
gunah sin
hadis traditions of the prophet
hajj pilgrimage to Mecca
halal lawful, with religious sanction; (an animal) slaughtered as prescribed by Islamic law
ibadat worship
imam leader in prayers
iman faith
jihad striving; an Islamic war against unbelief, whether external or internal
kafir unbeliever, non-Muslim
khas mahal personal demesne land
khet majur agricultural landless labor
khuda God
madarsa a higher school or college teaching Islamic laws and jurisprudence as primary subjects
mahajan moneylender
maulavi a Muslim doctor of law or a Muslim learned man
mofussil interior of a district, away from the town or city
murid disciple of a pir
nawab a title or rank conferred like peerage on Muslim gentlemen of distinction and good service
nazr present / tribute
paik armed retainer
pir sufi guide
praja tenant
qazi Islamic judge
raiyat peasant, cultivator, tenant
raiyati belonging to a tenant
sabha association
sajjadanishin literally one who sits on the prayer carpet; successor to the authority of a sufi saint at his shrine, usually a lineal descendant of the saint
sanyasi ascetic
salami traditional fee paid to the landlord on purchase of land or on obtaining tenancy
shariat Islamic law
shirk associating false gods with the one, true God
sufi Muslim mystic, one connected to the sufi orders
swavarna high caste
tabligh proselytization
tammaduni cultural
tauhid unity of God
ulema plural of alim
urs celebration of the death day of a sufi saint; major annual festival at many
zakat compulsory Islamic charity
zamindar holder of a property in land who paid revenue to the government under the Permanent Settlement of 1793
BIBLIOGRAPHY