Spray Rails

The second major type of sectional consciousness bred and often directly fostered by colonialism was religious division— Hindu and Muslim 'cornmunalism. Clear thinking on this very complex subject has been hindered considerably by the development in the twentieth century of two opposite stereotypes—the communalist assumption of Hindus and Muslims as homogeneous and inevitably hostile entities, two 'nations' ever since medieval times; and the nationalist

countermyth of a golden age of perfect amity broken solely by British divide-and-rule. Both stereotypes assume kinds of country-wide integration and uniformity almost certainly impossible prior to the development of communications and economic connections in the second half of the nineteenth century. Indian nationalism and Hindu and Muslim communalism are in fact both essentially modern phenomena: Instances of local conflicts between Hindus and Muslims may certainly be found occasionally in past centuries, just as there are numerous instances of Shia- Sunni clashes and caste quarrels. But communal riots do seem to have been significantly rare down to the 1880s. Thus in 1944 Coupland, a scholar with clear imperialist affiliations who surely had no reason to underplay the issue (he even declared that the Hindu-Muslim problem was 'the cause of the continuance of British rule'), found one major instance at Benares in 1809 (where Hindus are said to have destroyed 50 mosques), and the next big outbreak only in 1871- 72, followed by a series of riots from 1885 onwards. (R. Coupland, Constitutional Problem in India, p. 29)

That communalism in a large measure sprang from elite conflicts over jobs and political favours has long been a truism, and scholars have generally concentrated or, this level alone. Thus Francis Robinson's very detailed work on U.P. Muslims frankly excludes mass riots from its purview through its focus on 'elite groups concerned in making polities'. (Separatism among Indian Muslims, p. 6) The roots of elite communalism will be studied in the next section along with its historical contemporary, intelligentsia or 'middle-class' nationalism. But the tragic fact has to be admitted that communalism also acquired a mass dimension from an early date— though a dimension obviously not unconnected with the activities of elite groups. While the potentially communal dimensions of the Pabna riots or the Moplah out-

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breaks were not developed in our period—perhaps because of the absence as yet of a separatist intelligentsia leadership in Bengal or Malabar—Hindu and Muslum elites were much more evenly balanced in the United Provinces and the Punjab, and it was in this region that riots were becoming increasingly common from the 1880s onwards. Socio-economic tensions might have been ultimately responsible in part. Thus Hindu peasants faced Muslim talukdars and landlords in large parts of Avadh and the Aligarh-Bulandshahr region, urban Muslim concentrations in U.P. towns mainly consisted of artisans, shopkeepers and petty traders while most big merchants and bankers were Hindus, while in the Punjab Hindu traders and moneylenders easily became unpopular among Muslim peasants.

But the riots themselves usually occurred over issues quite far removed from economic grievances. In a movement only just beginning to be explored, a rash of rioting over cow-

slaughter spread over much of northern India. Gerald Barrier mentions 15 major riots of this type in the Punjab between 1883 and 1891, and such disturbances reached their climax in eastern U.P. and Bihar between 1888 and 1893, the districts worst affected being Ballia, Benares, Azamgarh, Gorakhpur, Arrah, Saran, Gaya and Patna. Serious riots occurred also in Bombay city and a number of Maharashtrian towns between 1893 and 1895. A Gujarati mill-owner had organized a cow-protection society in Bombay in 1893, while an additional aggravating factor was Tilak's reorganization of the Ganapati festival on a sarvajanik or community basis. Songs written for Ganapati Utsavas urged Hindus to boycott the Muharram, in which they had freely participated before (the reformist journal Sudharak even commented in 1898 that Muharram had been much more of a national festival than Ganapati), and some of them were openly inflammatory: 'What boon has Allah conferred upon you/That you have become Mussalmans today? Do not be friendly to a religion which is alien. . . . The cow is our mother, do not forget her.' (R. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya, p. 78; In the industrial suburbs of Calcutta, the first recorded riot took place in May 1891, followed by disturbances at Titagarh and Garden Reach during Bakr-Id in 1896 and the large-scale Talla riot in north Calcutta in 1897.

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Labour

Dipesh Chakrabarti has recently used the Calcutta jute mill riots of the mid-1890s as a point of entry into a subject almost entirely unexplored in our country so far—the emergence of early

labour consciousness. Sizeable proletarian concentrations had developed around the Bombay cotton and Calcutta jute mills by the 1890s, living and working in conditions every bit as

appalling, if not worse, as those witnessed in similar phases of early industrial capitalism in other parts of the world. Even the paltry restrictions on the employment of children and women

theoretically imposed by the Factory Acts of 1881 and 1891 (mainly at the instance of a

Lancashire jealous of the Bombay Indian textile industry) were seldom observed, and a working day of 15, 16, sometimes even 18 hours remained extremely common. In Bombay, where a predominantly Marathi labour force facilitated some degree of social contact across class lines, middle-class philanthrophic efforts to improve labour conditions began fairly early with N.M. Lokhande (an associate of Phule) starting the weekly Dinabandhu in 1880, organizing labour meetings to demand shorter hours in 1884, and even starting a Bombay Mill-hands' Association in 1890. This, however, was not a trade union, it merely involved Lokhande setting up an office to give free advice to mill-hands who came to him. Similar activities were started by the Brahmo social reformer Sasipada Banerji among the Bengali jute mill-workers of Baranagore, a Calcutta suburb— night schools, clubs, temperance societies, ajournal named Bharat Sramajeebi (1874), all trying to inculcate a middle class Victorian morality of thrift, sobriety and self-help among labourers. European mill-managers declared 'that those of their hands who attended Sasi Babu's schools were the very people that were found to be most careful and painstaking in their work', and the manager of the Baranagore Jute Mills, W. Alexander of the Borneo Jute Company, was in fact one of Banerji's principal patrons. Even this kind of middle-class philanthrophy died away in Calcutta in the 1890s as up-country immigrant labour from eastern U.P. and Bihar

increasingly displaced Bengalis in the jute mills. The coolies in the mines of Bihar and Bengal and tea gardens of Assam were also immigrants, wrenched hundreds of miles away from their homes amidst all the horrors of the indenture system, and living utterly isolated lives in their new environment. Bengali intelligentsia leaders like Dwarkanath Ganguli did launch a memorable campaign in the 1880s against the slave labour conditions in the tea plantations, but no one as yet made the attempt to organize the coolies themselves.

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Workers did occasionally fight back in their own way, through assaults on overseers, sporadic riots and spontaneous short-lived strikes. Twenty-five important strikes have been recorded in Bombay and Madras between 1882 and J890, several big strikes in Bombay in 1892-93 and 1901, and a new note of militancy was evident among Calcutta jute workers in the mid-1890s, leading the Indian Jute Mills' Association to ask the Bengal Government for 'additional police supervision' to curb 'riotous combinations' of mill-hands in April 1895. But the important point made by Chakrabarti is the way in which embryonic labour protest could often take the form of a kind of 'community-consciousness' rather than a clear recognition of class. Muslim workers demanded holidays for Id or Muharram, Hindus for Rathjatra, and at times fought each other bitterly over issues like cow-slaughter or the construction of places of worship on disputed land, as in the riots in and around Calcutta in 1896-97. There was evidently a carryover here of attitudes evolved in the labour catchment areas of east U.P. and Bihar, from where so many jute mill-workers were coming in the 1890s, and which were also the main centres of the cow- protection riots. If, as E.P. Thompson has shown so brilliantly, the making of the English working class was enormously helped by the rich tradition of artisan radicalism which had preserved and extended the more democratic aspects of the English bourgeois revolution of the

seventeenth century, the impoverished Indian peasant or ruined artisan being sucked into factories tended to fall back upon sectional ties of region, caste, kinship or religion. The new urban environment in fact often strengthened such old loyalties, as the new immigrant found himself in an intensely competitive surplus labour market where unskilled hands fought each other for jobs—and jobs could usually be secured only through sardars who were likely to favour their own community or kin, and who could also at times act as carriers of the separatist ideology of their social superiors. Chakrabarti's paper shows contacts being established by 1896 between some Muslim jute mill-workers of Rishra through their local imam with a prominent up-country Muslim merchant of Calcutta, Haji Nur

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Muhammad Zakaria, himself already active in pan-Islamist agitation. It is also significant that the first relatively stable labour organization that we hear of in the Calcutta industrial area was Muhammedan Association of Kankinara, founded in 1895, which raised funds to improve mosques and provide alms and sickness benefits for its members.

Thus the sharpening economic tensions in the Calcutta jute mills in the mid-1890s—caused by a sudden influx of up-country labour, near-famine food prices, and the introduction of electric lights which immediately prolonged the working day—led to outbursts against employers but also fratricidal riots; though Chakra-barti's argument that there were perhaps more of the latter than the former has been questioned in a later detailed study by Ranjit Das Gupta. Such fluidity would remain a significant feature of twentieth century Indian history, with communal, class, and national consciousness interpenetrating and passing over into each other. Agrarian disturbances would often turn into communal riots, and cow-protection enthusiasts or pan-Islamist agitators could also alternate as labour or peasant leaders. Perhaps this is not so strange or unique after all—one might recall George Rude's comments on the pre-industrial crowd, where one type of militancy could easily turn into another, or John Foster's study of class struggle in the English industrial revolution, where 'sectional consciousness' could trigger off class consciousness or vice versa.