Rakesh Batabyal. Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, 1943-1947. London: Thousand Oaks, 2005. 428 pp. $97.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7619-3335-9.Reviewed by Anirudh Deshpande (Motilal Nehru College (E), University of Delhi)Published on H-Asia (July, 2007)Colonial Cousins: Communalism and Nationalism in Modern IndiaFor readers unfamiliar with the terms in which modern Indian history is usually written, communalism should be described before the review of the book is presented. The word communalism obviously comes from community and communal which may mean entirely different things to people in the West. The closest parallels of communalism in India are racism and anti-Semitism, etc. in the West; while in India communalism makes a person prefer a certain communal identity over other secular identities. In many parts of the West a position of racial superiority is assumed by many individuals and social groups over people of non-European extraction. In both instances religious or race identities are internalized and displayed by individuals who believe in myths, which constitute an ideology. The modern systematic articulation of such myths is called communal ideology in the Indian sub-continent. Selective history, carefully constructed memories of injustices, a variety of myths, the role of the state, and violence in multiple forms are the foundations of communalism. Social exclusion and communal violence ranging from carefully organized riots by political formations to pogroms, such as the one witnessed in Gujarat in 2002, are integral to communalism in India. Readers who have not read much of Indian history but are well versed in European and American history can easily understand "Indian communalism" with reference to similar developments in the context of many European and American countries. Although there is another form in which communalism manifests itself in India, called "casteism," communalism in general refers to religious communalism. India, like most other countries, has a history of religious conflict going back to the ancient period, but communalism refers to a modern consolidation of religious groups and identities and the politicization of religious organization and conflict which began during the colonial period, especially in the nineteenth century. While Indians contend with communalism in their everyday lives, it must be remembered that the development of the "two nation theory" leading to the creation of Pakistan on the basis of a mythical and monolithic Muslim nation in 1947 and the growth of Hindutva in the 1980s and 1990s were the most important achievements of communalism in twentieth-century India. The book under review should be read in this context of communalism in modern and contemporay India.This book narrates the rise of communalism in Bengal in the short term and tries to define communalism as an ideology. Throughout the volume both Muslim and Hindu communalism is theorized in opposition to a secular Indian nationalism of which the Indian National Congress (in Rakesh Batabyal's view) appears as the greatest exponent. Politics in Bengal during the 1940s came to be influenced by the Muslim League, Hindu Mahasabha, and the Communists at the expense of an ineffective Congress which, mainly due to the rise of Subhas Bose, had split into the pro- and anti-Bose factions. While communalism is defined as an ideology, nationalism in the colonial period cannot be defined easily as its opposite. The author has conceived the entire project on the basis of drawing a neat line of demarcation between communalism and nationalism. The book gives us a good idea of what communalism meant in Bengal during the 1940s, which was dominated by the Great Famine of 1943 and conditions arising from the Second World War. But it does not say much about nationalism as an ideology. Since the volume eschews a long-term perspective on nationalism and its complex relationship with communalism, it fails to answer some important questions. For instance, was Indian nationalism something much more than a striving for national unity against imperialism? What were its long-term weaknesses which created the space for the growth of communal ideologies and the two nation theory in India? Why did communalism replace nationalism as the stronger force of the two in people's lives during the 1940s? This volume is not designed to answer these questions, important as they are in the context of rising communalism in India during the last quarter of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Instead, after repeatedly underlining Congress's helplessness in the face of growing communal frenzy in Bengal in a chapter on the Noakhali riots, the author deflects the reader's attention to Gandhi's highly personalized and greatly publicized struggle against communal violence.Towards the end of the volume, in chapter 8, Gandhi's only too well-known sojourn in Noakhali is highlighted in an attempt to capture the Mahatma's rather touching finest hour. This is done to offer an alternative to the communalization of popular psyche in India. However, as the facts marshaled by Batabyal inadvertently tell us, by 1946 Gandhi was a spent force in Indian politics. Although his moral message would live on in a tiny section of inspired Indians, the somewhat baffling and ill-conceived Quit India movement of 1942 and his recognition of Jinnah as the most important representative of Indian Muslims in 1944 most certainly helped the rise of communalism in India in the 1940s. These are the important facts informing the rise of Jinnah and the demand for Pakistan which readers can easily glean from Batabyal's meticulous research. But the problem of dealing with Gandhi's approach to the communal question remains unaddressed. According to this reviewer the distinction between Gandhi as a person and Gandhi as the unquestioned moral leader of the Congress is more important to the historian. It is nobody's argument that Gandhi did not oppose communalism as best as he could within the limits of his world view. Unfortunately for the people of Bengal and many other parts of India, which suffered the consequences of partition this kind of moral opposition, in the absence of an organized cadre based fight against communalism, simply was not enough to save them from the horrors of communal hatred and violence. After the die was cast and partition became a ground reality, Gandhi emerged as a symbol of peace. His removal of himself from the ideological site of partition could do little to address the causes of communalism in India. Indeed his moral leadership of the Congress nationalist movement had also undoubtedly contributed to it. Ultimately he could neither arrest the decline of secular nationalism nor take the majority of the Congress with him.Ironically, in his finest hour Gandhi had already become irrelevant to the vast majority of Indians (and Pakistanis, it may always be added as an afterthought) in 1946-47. Quit India in 1942 and the sterile belated talks with Jinnah in 1944 were Gandhi's individual decisions. Was there any point in virtually conceding Pakistan and denying the two nation theory at the same time? The Quit India resolution, it is well known, did not have the support of all Congressmen and ended up removing the Congress from the center stage of Indian politics during the war, while the talks with the "sole spokesman" ended up enhancing Jinnah's stature and legitimizing his communal claims even amongst several Muslims who could still be called Congress supporters in 1944. Both instances demonstrated serious flaws in a movement over which a single and often momentarily ill-informed patriarch had so much influence. In the ultimate analysis Gandhi's moral authority could neither substitute nor overcome the collective failure of the Congress leadership in dealing with the communal question.Coming to Bengal it is not difficult to observe that Gandhi was instrumental in getting Bose ousted from the Congress and thereby mortally wounding it. A Congress in disarray, or whatever remained of it after the important leaders had been jailed in 1942, was hardly in a position to combat the kind of communalism which began to sweep the Bengal social landscape from 1943 onwards. The book presents an excellent survey of how the absence of viable alternatives helped communalism grow in Bengal during the 1940s. The colonial state, Muslim League, and Hindu Mahasabha are rightly implicated in the growth of the communal project. At this time the interests of Moscow guided the Communists and even they upheld the claims of the Muslim League.Important as these findings are, the volume fails to address some important questions. It does not tell us why the Congress was not a force to reckon with among the masses of Bengal in the 1940s. Why was the peasantry of Bengal alienated from the Congress that had organized mass anti-imperialist movements across the country in 1905, 1921-22 and 1930-32? Unless the story of this mass alienation from the Congress in Bengal is recounted, it is impossible to fully comprehend how the Muslim League emerged as the most important party of the Bengali Muslims in the space of a few years. If peasant unrest was ultimately articulated in communal ideology, as the author concedes in a short conclusion (p. 383), why did the Congress fail to address and utilize this unrest in the 1930s and 1940s ? The election results of 1946 in Bengal (p.218) only expressed the communal polarization of the Bengalis which took place during the Second World War--the Congress polled only 0.5 percent of Muslim votes in comparison with the League which got 89.6 percent of Muslim votes. Pakistan had been created. Obviously, given the developments during the war years, by 1946 all "memories of class and communal solidarity against the colonial power were forgotten" in Bengal (p. 383). The fact that communalism grew and secular nationalism declined in Indian politics increasingly since the 1920s is not given due importance in this volume because of the author's Left-Nationalist paradigm.The book comprises nine chapters including the short conclusion. The long and comprehensive introduction, which is kept outside the chapterization scheme, is called "Communalism and Historiography." It comprises the most problematic part of the book raising important theoretical questions regarding the various historical approaches to communalism. The Colonial-Cambridge, Marxist, and Post-Modernist perspectives on communalism in India have been commented upon in the introduction. However, upon carefully reading the introduction, this reviewer was left wondering whether Indian communalism is a product of modernity or an outcome of insufficient modernization. A pre-history of communalism going back to the early nineteenth century certainly exists but there was no communalism, as we know it from the colonial times onwards, in pre-colonial India. What explains the absence of communal riots in Mughal India despite the other conflicts which raged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Obviously communities, provided they existed as we perceive them today, pursued politics differently in pre-colonial India. Both accommodation and exclusion of regional elites was practiced at the imperial Mughal court in Agra, but the frictions and politics of the Mughal era did not create communalism.At the same time communalism has thrived even as India has modernized decade after decade since 1947. No matter how you perceive it one thing seems to be clear--economic modernization and modernity (or westernization) does not spell the end of communalism. Indeed, as Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s and Gujarat in our times demonstrate, modernization does not preclude communalism. It often comes hand in glove with myths which are normally associated with a pre-modern societies. A critical study of India's anti-colonial freedom struggle shows that communalism and nationalism grew together in the first half of the twentieth century. Both derived legitimacy from the process of modernity ushered into India by the various structures of British colonialism. The question is why and how were these two supposedly different political phenomena related? Despite favoring a line which artificially separates nationalism and communalism in India, the author concedes that nationalism failed to accommodate communalism in modern India (pp. 58-59). Did this happen because the epistemological link between nationalism and communalism was strong enough to overcome the compulsions of national unity against the foreigner? Or, did the Congress brand of nationalism fail because it did not satisfy the socio-economic aspirations of the majority of Indians who were marginalized, poor and illiterate? These questions remain open in this otherwise well researched thesis.Chapters 1, 2, and 3 survey politics in Bengal in the context of the famine of 1943 and the Second World War. Chapter 4 presents an analysis of political trends in 1945-46 and examines the build up to the communal frenzy which swept Bengal in the latter half of 1946. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 zoom in on the well documented Calcutta killings and Noakhali-Tippera Riots. Then comes the alternative to communalism in a chapter on Gandhi's battle against communal hatred in Noakhali followed by the conclusion. The book makes for easy reading and parts of it dealing with the famine and riots are quite interesting. However the admirable efforts of the author are somewhat marred by his taking potshots at other Indian historians who also have laudable contributions to their credit. For instance chapter 5 on the Calcutta Riots begins with an unnecessary attack on Ranajit Guha, the well-known founder of the Subaltern School of Indian historiography (pp. 237-238). While it is true that subaltern historians have focused their energies on popular movements which often took a violent turn in colonial India they do not seem to have justified communal violence which occurred between various subaltern groups. It is indeed difficult to agree with Batabyal when, with reference to Guha's position, he writes the following: "Violence of such magnitude cannot be simply reduced to the manifestation of an assumption of emancipation of the oppressed" (p. 238). Is all violence reduced to emancipatory violence in the subaltern scheme of things? This reviewer does not think so. Mass participation in the communal project and the violence integral to it occurs because of the internalization of elite communal ideology by the masses. This is different from a subaltern consciousness which develops against elite domination and hegemony.Guha is not the only one at the receiving end. Another example is Sudhir Kakar, the famous Indian psychoanalyst, who is criticized for not displaying "much intellectual force" is his understanding of communal conflict. This act of sniping, apparently caused by an unpardonable failure of Kakar to describe religious conflict as communal conflict, is followed by a quote from his Colours of Violence (1996) which makes perfect sense to me: "Together with religious selfhood, the 'I-ness' of religious identity, we have a second track of 'We-ness' which is the experience of being part of a community of believers" (p. 51). That is precisely how individual consciousness grows into collective and ultimately communal consciousness. French historians would call this the process of mentality formation. I find nothing wrong in Kakar's assertion, especially since no ideology is free of psychological aspects. Is religion itself not a product of human psychological desires? Why a social being attracted to an ideology is often a psychological question which may be informed by other reasons like economics as well. You do not have to be an expert to perceive that deep seated fears of the "other" and various pathological feelings underline the appeal and popularity of communalism. But to attempt a definition of communalism foremost as an ideology, as Batabyal is trying to do, by excluding psychoanalysis from the explanatory framework appears to be an act of deliberate shortsightedness. Such belittling of well-informed and sociologically enriching perspectives can have unfortunate theoretical consequences. Scoring needless points does lead to a lopsided understanding of the "hegemonic hold" which the communalists developed over the people of Bengal (p. 260). Since the psychological connection between "hegemonic hold" and individuals subscribing to the communal ideology is precluded from the book's paradigm, holding the masses largely responsible for the communal violence of 1946 is a short step away. Hence the chapter on the Calcutta Riots contains the following revealing sentences: "At the same time, however, to repose the burden on Suhrawardy and the League, and on the other hand to blame the Congress leadership for uttering irresponsible statements or being eager to arrive at a compromise with the colonial authorities, leads one to the fallacy of ignoring the culpability of the communalised masses of people, who alone could commit acts of such communal depredations" (emphasis in original, p. 259).Alone? Can the communalised masses act alone ? Is communal mass violence autonomous? Readers more aware of the concept of hegemony than this reviewer can answer these questions on their own. As far as the book is concerned, the brilliant descriptions of violence it contains clearly mention the role of local leadership (not to speak of the Muslim League's Direct Action Day call and a colonial state unable and unwilling to preserve peace) in the spread of violence.