Notun Ihudi: Jewishness as a code and its representations in post-partition Bangla intellectual and political production? | Arka Sen Chakraborty

Abstract

The question “who is a Jew” predominates a majority of the discourses around the Judaic community and has done since the time that a popular and motivated enquiry into Jewishness first began. While the Diaspora itself cannot be essentialized, the Eurocentric notion of Jews as a model and the quintessential minority still sticks as an important referent and code, one whose use has not been restricted to Jewish intellectual production alone. Curiously, a large section of the post-independent Indian and specifically a post-partition Bengali intelligentsia identified themselves as “new jews”, harking on their status as minorities. Riddled with anachronistic perceptions of supposed Muslim persecution of Jews mirroring the treatment meted out to East-Bengali Hindus, these intellectuals balanced the line between minoritarian and majoritarian discourses, the referent of Jewishness centre-stage to their presumptions. I would like to observe the use and the ontology of this code in the context of the literature produced by such ideologues. Taking a cue from Milinda Banerjee’s essay on the new refugees, I would like to contextualize these intellectual and social categories under the ambit of political relations while also unpacking the power dynamics embedded into the use of such codes as the notun ihudi (new jews).

Translation:

All translations from Bangla to English are mine.

The Jew in “World Historical Imagination”

The research preoccupation of this article is found to be of increasing importance to the researcher, as the questions surrounding Israel and its offensive against Palestinians reveal troubling patterns of colonial and neo-colonial enterprise. The largely ambivalent nature of public discourse about the Israel-Palestine issue in India and the unrepresentative statist sympathy towards Israel both call into question the historically specific and located nature of the question in Indian intellectual polemics. The study of Jewish history and the study of the Jewish diaspora has often taken the form of a study of the Jewish people and their variations throughout the lived world. Conversions, Judaizing movements, returns and the sheer volume of different Judaic expressions dominate the academic (both public and cloistered [1]) discourses around the Jewish state and Jewish identity. The Jews as a people are focused on, as is their enduring persecution and the trauma as a result of that. In the great and sweeping episodes of human history, the Jews appear almost always in contexts of persecution and forced evacuations. In this framework, the Holocaust represents a big break with the culmination of political forces legitimizing the project of political Zionism that Theodor Herzl kickstarted. The foundation of the state of Israel seemed to have affected an abrupt break in this historical dynamic of the Jewish people. The Zionist state ensured that the dialectic of persecution and pogroms would not prevail and yet, it is the project of the state itself and the wider universe of Jewish and liberal ideologues to ensure that the persecution of the Jews is not forgotten. The Holocaust, with its immediate and brutal intensity redefined this accumulative and interrupted self-fashioning and perception of the Jews. I would like the word Holocaust here to invoke not only the event itself, but the surrounding liberal discourse around it, what Enzo Traverso calls the “civil religion” of the Holocaust [2]. As a result, it has acquired a centrality in modern memory unlike any other event. At the locus of the Holocaust’s evocative power is the image of the Jew as a persecuted minority but also, a hopeful survivor. This article takes a cue from that, choosing to observe how at a certain geographical space and at a specific historical time, a specific group of people decided to invoke this image of the Jewish people as the “quintessential minority” in the modern world. Here, as in much of bourgeois political modernity, the word minority is not just one related to population, of neutral, numerical valence. It has a decidedly normative content in the context of the nation-state, where the politics of recognition dictates the constant minority struggle for equal rights (in theory and praxis) and equal citizenship. If the Holocaust represented not only a break in the dynamics of Jewish history but a sharp volte face in the dynamics of History [3] itself, it only makes sense that the confusion and terror it invoked has been replicated en masse in global literature, be it political, academic or fictional.

The Partition of India was a displacement and cultural violence of similar magnitude, taking place only a few years after the Allies had won the war, a year before the State of Israel was established. In the provinces of Punjab and Bengal, the Muslim and Hindu populations were divided to form the new states of West and East Pakistan respectively, forcing a mass migration of Hindus to India and of Muslims into the two Pakistans. The state-sponsored and communal brutality that followed (siphoned off largely through the practices and instruments of the British Empire and its incumbent bourgeois nationalist opposition) has been recorded aplenty throughout the literary history of the independent nation-state. The wounds, for many Bengalis on both sides of the border, are still very fresh, procuring a centrality to it in Bengali consciousness similar to that of the Holocaust. It is no surprise then, that many Bengali intellectuals back then and even now find great salience between these two tragedies of human experience. Framing this entire discourse is Shubhoranjan Dasgupta’s claim that “each and every creative text on Partition which has survived the test of time, has condemned the Holocaust in aesthetic-humanist terms.” [4] Dasgupta notes that how for both the Partition and the Holocaust, no amount of literature could ever recapture the sheer volume of human convulsion and casualty. The Partition is seen in the specific, the Holocaust in the general [5]. Dasgupta writes in the 21st century, with a certain amount of historical distance. The writings of the early generations of post-partition Bengalis are perhaps even more revelatory towards the socio-historical and even philosophical conditions of such invocations.

The Bengal and the Jew in “World Historical Imagination”

The focus of this essay will be strictly on the intellectual production of East Bengali refugees in the Indian state of West Bengal as that is what is most immediately available to the researcher. The intellectual production that dominated in the 1940s and 1950s was inextricably linked to questions of nationalism and identity. The immediate political imperatives of the time made it obligatory. Novels, polemics, histories, plays and songs became vessels for expressions in national self-determination and anti-imperialist politics. The nation-state was fully realized in the works of politicians and ideologues in both the conservative and liberal sides of the spectrum. To trace the use of the Jewish referent or code would be to be very sensitive to these political differences. Many scholars have pointed out the paradox between the Hindu right’s valorization of Hitler and their admiration for the State of Israel. A brief look at some of the earliest canon of Partition polemics may provide some logical consistency to the conservative argument. One of the earliest examples of linking the Partition to the Holocaust comes from quite possibly the most accomplished historian of early 20th-century India. In an article published in the Amrita Bazar Patrika (another very famous vessel of nationalist self-determination), Sir Jadunath Sarkar discussed the refugee problem that was dominating West Bengal. According to him and many other East Bengali refugees at the time, Nehru’s government had not offered the same rehabilitation services to East Bengali refugees as they had done in Punjab. As a result, a mass of refugees was homeless, having to fend for themselves either in refugee camps or train stations. An evocative picture is etched in Bengali memory, that of the Sealdah Station, teeming with refugee families, all barely having any space in which to conduct themselves. Sarkar’s polemic portrays this frustration and rage. Nestled in this frustration is a hopeful stance. Sarkar advises the government to properly rehabilitate the refugees. He does so by drawing a comparison:

“For it is no good blinking the fact that East Pakistan is lapsing into barbarism, and the Hindu population there has no future, no chance of honourable work and fair employment by service or trade, no hope of real political equality or economic prosperity by honest open competition. European travellers have described the condition of Palestine under Muhammedan rule, it was then a poor desert country, with an ignorant, impoverished, half-civilized population leading a sort of animal existence and dying of disease, dust and hunger like neglected cattle. Then forty years ago, the Jews began to buy plots of land from their Arab owners and by introducing roads, schools, hospitals, fruit cultivation and an honest police force, turned the desert into a garden.

Every Jewish farm is now like an oasis of civilization and modern scientific amenities in that once barbarous holyland. And when the Jews have fought and won their national state in Palestine, it will become an advance post of modern progress in the Near East, a spark of light in the midst of the mess of Muslim misgovernment and stagnation. Eastern Bengal is going the way of Palestine without the Jews. We must make our Wesr Bengal what Palestine under Jewish rule will be, a light in darkness, an oasis of civilization in the desert of medieval ignorance and theocratic bigotry.” [6]

The strong communal polemics are evident. The anachronistic comparison with Palestine is also striking. The disinterested truth-obsessed historian has made his claim. Regardless of the very brutal trauma Sir Jadunath is referring to, we can, with the benefit of historical distance, make out the deeply ideological nature of this comparison, reaching to make its claim of Jewish survival at the face of “Muslim misgovernance”. The Jews here are not a referent or a code. A direct comparison is being made and yet, it lays the ground firmly for many polemics to come. Jadunath Sarkar was not a Hindu nationalist and yet, his works have often been valorized by the latter group. One can take this polemic under the same brand of a majoritarian discourse and its balancing act between the minority and the majority. The Jews are already set up as survivors, persecuted under Mohammedan rule. In Freudian terms, there is a direct and distinct identification taking place, one that would be discursively mandated in political literature in the years to come. Shyama Prasad Mookherjee, the founder of Bhartiya Jan Sangh and a true predecessor to the modern Hindu right, drew similar comparisons. One wonders what audience these ideologues were speaking to by invoking their mostly European metaphorical comparisons. It is a practice which continues to this day in the literature of the Right, even if the discursive boundaries have changed over time. Tathagata Ray for example, compares the suffering of the East Bengali refugees to the plight of the Jews under Hitler. The communal polemics involved in this invocation, I hope, have been made clear. An interesting variant of this expression is to be found in the works of Prafulla Chakrabarti. His 1990 book “Marginal Men” and its Bengali version, Prantik Manob, are both detailed and comprehensive works on the conditions of East Bengali refugees and the politics, especially that of the Left Front, that went into the governmental instruments deployed for the rehabilitation or lack thereof. Regardless of any political affiliation, Chakrabarti’s prose has a biting and impassioned critique of the degradation of living conditions of the “marginal men”. The polemics he draws bear resemblance to those of Sir Jadunath’s, writing 42 years before him, rather than to any contemporary history. It is precisely why I pair Chakrabarti with Sarkar and Mookherjee [7]. What is striking, however, is the reoccurrence of comparisons. Chakrabarti titles the first chapter of his account, “Exodus” and refers continually to forced evacuations of Bengalis as “pogroms”, both references to episodes and terminologies associated with Jewish history. It is not, perhaps, that they are conscious invocations of specifically Jewish contexts. Rather, they show very vividly how episodes and terminologies specific to Jewish persecution and victimhood have become the accepted parlance in speaking about displacement and persecution. The signs and signifiers of Jewish experience are now the modular general forms used in representing such displacement [8].

All of these comparisons, however, have nothing to do with the symbolic register. They speak of a time, a milieu, an audience and a deep seated and yet very historically contingent expression of collective trauma. The symbolic comparison; the use of the Jews as a code or a referent to homelessness, displacement, trauma and survival, comes to the fore a little later in time than the invocations of Jadunath Sarkar and S.P. Mookherjee and at the opposite end of the political spectrum.

It was Salil Sen’s 1953 play Notun Ihudi that seems to have normalized the use of this referent. By the 1950s, the literary and political milieu had changed drastically. The ascendancy of the Left Front government meant a stricter and more socially relevant literary canon. The nationalist self-determination of theatre, literature and poetry was replaced or rather supplemented by a leftist surge in politics. A Marxist lens came into writing, with a historical materialist focus on economy, politics and application. Most of the eras most celebrated poets, novelists and playwrights were either directly involved or in engagement with leftist politics [9] [10]. Salil Sen was no different. A member of the Communist Party, his play can be safely described as “Marxist”. It follows the journey of a Brahmin family as they leave East Pakistan and are riddled by tragedy and trouble as they cross the new border. The play opens with a group of people singing the Bengali song Dhono Dhanye Pusphe Bhora before the Partition erupts. It is a critical indictment of the partition, the0 key difference between it and the indictments mentioned above being that there is no mention of any specific Muslim tyranny. In fact, the educated Muslim is seen in a flattering light. When the head of the family, a Bramhin pandit named Manmohan loses his job (Sanskrit is no longer being taught at schools), he and his responsible son Mohon are visited by a maulvi, Mirza. It is Mirza’s words that frame the play’s thematic:

“Mohoinya, what are you saying? A nation is not just an illusion, it is the hearts of its men…… Give me your word, that you will return to us.”

The idioms of return and nation as an idea are moored in this dialogue and as such intrinsically related to the Jewish question. In fact, the most striking thing about the play is that throughout its duration there is not one single reference to Jews. There are no Jews in the play, nor are they or their situation ever referred to. Notun Ihudi then, is used completely in the symbolic register. Somehow the absence of Jews in the narrative, as opposed to Sarkar or Chakrabarti’s narratives, makes the symbolic salience even more comprehensive and complete. Salil Sen is clear about this usage.

“The play is written for those broken udbastu (without a home) [11] and their plight in displacement from East Bengal. The use of the title Notun Ihudi is deliberate on my part. The decision was partly symbolic. The Jews were made “udbastu” as a result of Hitler’s oppression. The immigrants from East Pakistan were put under similar duress. This is why the play is called Notun Ihudi ….”

The first time the word udbastu is used in the specific. The second time it is used in the general. The modern Jewish experience here is used as a referent (as opposed to the naturalized pogrom and Exodus in Prafulla Chakrabarti’s work). While Sen finds the decision partly symbolic, the researcher is inclined to think that in discursive terms, this invocation is completely symbolic, so naturalized these idioms have become in a global modern discourse.

The play itself, aesthetically speaking, is not very impressive. The characters are archetypical, the story is predictable. Yet, all evidence suggests to it being very successful on stage, so much so that it was made into a feature film directed by Sen himself, kickstarting his own long film career. Classic personalities of the Bengali theatre world like Bhanu Bandhopadhyay and Kanu Bandopadhyay play important characters in the original stage performance of the play in 1953. I would argue that Notun Ihudi gained such a popularity not because of its aesthetic quality but rather because it harked on such fresh and visceral trauma and because of its inventive use of the Jewish identity as an almost universal referent. The efficacy of this argument is supported by some observations Partha Chatterjee made in 2015,

“I first came to know about the fate of European Jews in a roundabout way. Sometime in my childhood, I came to hear the phrase notun ihudi – the new Jews. It was probably the title of a movie. It referred, I was told, to people like us, thrown out of our homes in the eastern half of Bengal which had now become part of another country called Pakistan. Both my parents came from there. Once every few months, I would wake up in the morning to find the house full of strangers – relatives from Pakistan who stayed with us for a few days and then moved to a more permanent dwelling. We were, I heard, the new Jews – refugees, forced to make a new life in a strange land.” [12]

Clearly the phrase was in common parlance when the film came out. It was a part (as to how central it was is unclear) of the wider identification that East Bengali refugees had kept in place for themselves. Of course, the idiom of return as expressed by Salil Sen complicates the picture even further.

By 1953, the State of Israel was five years old. It had been 3 years since India had recognized the state of Israel but in principle had refrained from establishing any diplomatic relations. This was reflected in leftist discourse at the time. Several periodicals and magazines were used as vessels for leftist literature, including Parichay, Swadhinota, Kallol, Progoti. Eminent historians and intellectuals like Ranajit Guha, Shushuobhan Sarkar and Nirendranath Ray [13] discuss issues relating to Palestine and the European Wars as a whole. The Jews are simultaneously represented as victims of aberrations of political modernity while also, the Zionist project is criticized for its colonial ambitions. The Indian Muslim response to the problem was equally damning. The presence of a significant rich Muslim population, dedicated to sending money to the Arab nationalist cause and the sacred nature of the city Jerusalem made it so. Islamic nationalist secular newspapers and periodicals of the time like Al-Muslim (written in Bengali), express a sentiment similar to one presented by many Hindu Bengali leftist intellectuals of the time; their main object of ire being the British hand in souring Jewish-Arabic relations and the after-effects of colonialism in the Middle East. Al-Muslim also draws sensitivity to the sacredness of Jerusalem and to the historiographically accepted fact that Jews were much more prosperous and secure under Muslim rule than they had ever been under Christendom. A kind of inverse to the discourse of Sir Jadunath is presented here. The problem, it seems was already looming large in the minds of Bengali Muslim intelligentsia. The fact that the Congress government did not recognize the State of Israel before both a Shia and a Sunni country had recognized Israel. This complicated but, as it should be (The Jew and the Israeli are not mutually exclusive to each other), did not dampen the effectiveness of Sen’s metaphor, emblematic of the sentiments of the time regarding the Jews and world history at large.

One thing however, needs to be made clear. There is an underlying thread to all these invocations from both sides. It is that they are a product of a strictly elite imagination. For the educated nationalist intelligentsia, and the intelligentsia incipient to it, exposure to world events and history came from an imperialist lens. They had, in most cases, inherited a bourgeois European framework of making sense of what was happening elsewhere in the world. That much is evident from any cursory glance at lectures or syllabuses in the new prestigious universities that were established for the creation of this new Indian bourgeoisie, still not in complete autonomous charge of their own political social or economic capital. As such, their view of Jewish history was a highly Eurocentric one. One wonders how much interaction with indigenous Indian Jews informed their invocations. They were an elite bourgeoisie, not in opposition to other class interests but definitely exclusive in its framework. In the play Notun Ihudi, Salil Sen depicts not only the plight of the Brahmin family but also the family of Namashudra peasants attached to them. It does not take long to cross one’s mind that such an invocation of the Jewish referent would never occur to the Namashudra. Even the leftist progressive writer could not escape this epistemological impediment. Partha Chatterjee explains this salience to the Jews in exactly these terms.

“I also discovered why our elders among the Bengali Hindu refugees from East Pakistan so loved the analogy with European Jews. The latter represented, they pointed out endlessly, the cream of European intellectual and cultural life. Some of the greatest scientists, writers, musicians and artists of our time had been driven into exile by European racists who hated Jews. They were, of course, quick to add that the same thing had happened to the Hindus who were the intellectual elite of East Bengal: they had been expropriated and expelled by an ignorant Muslim peasantry and its bigoted leaders. It didn’t take me long to recognize in this comparison the signs of class prejudice tinged with religious animosity.” [14]

We have come full circle with the invocations of religious animosity and bigotry. The imprint of the ideologues of Sir Jadunath’s age is clear. In fact, Sir Jadunath, in his article makes it quite clear that the East Bengali Hindus were the elite; the cream of the crop of intellectual life and as such deserved of state protection and rehabilitation. Dakhshinaranjan Basu, another East Bengali Hindu intellectual, compiled a magisterial account of partition stories, titled “Chere Asha Gram”. This work also refers to East Bengali refugees as the New Jews. While it in itself became a canon for Bengali academic literature and historiography, it was criticized by later schools of thought as portraying experiences that were inherently exclusive [15].

The Specific in the General

In my opinion, it is not only in historically specific terms that we can find this invocation exclusive and disingenuous to the larger picture of Jewish and partition history. Rather, it is also in the inherent structure of thought involved in such an invocation, deriving a specific (the Bengali refugee) from the accepted general (the Jew). There is an underlying Cartesian sentiment to it which is inescapably Eurocentric and as such incompatible to those who did not adequately fit into the new Indian bourgeoisie. Still, it is only with historical distance that the researcher can speak about a symbol and a referent that was undoubtedly effective in its own time, if only for a specific audience. What is even more fascinating, and which must be a subject of an even bigger study, is the assumption of the Jewish experience as “quintessential” or as the “universal general”, even if it is, again, a strictly European general. It was still effective and evocative in a certain South Asian ambience at a certain historical juncture, who’s own “civil religion” has proven to sustain itself to this day. Thus, it is no surprise that such comparisons and references are being used even now, not only in politics and academia but also in the more mystical realm of aesthetics. The politics of recognition and representation know no generic bounds.

Notes and References:

[1] I am referring here to the distinction made by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his, “The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and his Empire of Truth”. Every academic discipline, according to this distinction has a “public” life; one mire in political and social conditions, and a “cloistered” life, whose historiography is not of much consequence outside the insular bounds of academic discourse. For details see, Dipesh Chakrabarty. The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar and His Empire of Truth. United Kingdom: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

[2] Enzo Traverso laments the privileging of memory in post-totalitarian Europe to be exclusively towards the “innocent victims” of the Holocaust. The actual political contributions of anti-fascist actors and organizations seem to have been forgotten. Here, I use “civil religion” in a broader sense that the term implies to refer to its privileging in memory full stop. For details see, Enzo Traverso. Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, 1914-1945. United Kingdom: Verso Books, 2017.

[3] Here, I refer to the Hegelian concept of a progressive “History” where the progress of reason, capital and freedom lead to the end of History as such. This view was shattered by the immediate brutality of the Holocaust.

[4] Ranabir Samaddar, Reflections on partition in the east. India: Vikas Publishing House, 1997

[5] Subhoranjan Dasgupta, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga – A Creative Statement on Displacement and Violence. India: Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, 2004

[6] Amrita Bazar Patrika, 18th August, 1948

[7] He is not alone at his age for this matter. A cursory look at the literary and social enunciations of the late 20th and even the 21st century will indicate that such an invocation is quite commonplace still, however criticized it maybe by a dominant academic mainstream.

[8] Prafulla K. Chakrabarti, The Marginal Men: The Refugees and the Left Political Syndrome in West Bengal. India: Lumière Books, 1990.

[9] A great way to observe the sea change in milieu that takes place is to take a proper glance at any of the periodicals of the time. Without fail ever since the 1940s, most renowned periodicals shift from topics concerning literary and academic matters to those more of the immediately political kind. See https://sanhati.com/porichoy/

[10] Sumanta Mukhopadhyay has written an insightful essay on the tensions and relations between art and politics in post independent West Bengal. It is available in Bengali the fourth issue of the Kolkata 21 magazine.

[11] I retain the term udbastu untranslated as it refers specifically (materially and imaginatively) to the East Bengali refugee’s condition of homelessness.

[12] https://savageminds.org/2015/09/09/partha-chatterjee-why-i-support-the-boycott-of-israeli-institutions/

[13] A longer, more detailed survey is required of the different angles and lenses through which many of these periodicals and little magazines engaged with questions of world history, especially on issue like the Second War and the division of Palestine.

[14] https://savageminds.org/2015/09/09/partha-chatterjee-why-i-support-the-boycott-of-israeli-institutions/

[15] The subaltern studies collective is referred to here. Both Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ranajit Guha have looked into the particulars of this branch of Partition literature.

(Author: Arka Sen Chakraborty is a 3rd year undergraduate student of History at the Presidency University, Kolkata, Email ID – arkasenchakraborty[at]gmail.com)