Dalit-Muslim Relations in Pre-Partition Bengal: Paradigm Shift in Dalit Discourse

by K.S. Chalam

Indian historiography is undergoing several challenges today. One of the issues that the contemporary historian encounters is about the selection of social categories to narrate changes that have taken place in the recent past. It is only by studying the contemporary history and relating it with the past that we can save/sustain the discipline of history in India. This has been the penchant of one of our most distinguished historians, Prof Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. He is now Professor of Asian History at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, and has visited India to deliver a lecture at Central University of Orissa, Koraput and to sign MOUs with some Central universities on behalf of the Government of New Zealand.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay has delivered the First Utkalmani Gopabandhu Dash Memorial lecture on ‘ Dalits in the Long History of Partition in Eastern India’ on January 21, 2013 at Koraput. I was invited by the Vice-Chancellor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University to preside over the lecture and offer remarks. I reluctantly agreed to go to Koraput as I knew the ordeal to reach there by road from Visakhapatnam. However, I was benefited by participating in the session and discussing issues of academic interest with Sekhar for almost three days. Perhaps he is the only scholar of international repute to have taken up the issues of caste in history after Eleanor Zeliot (who worked on Ambedkar). The learned Professor has been published extensively in international journals and is a celebrated name in the discipline. It is his zest for modern history that made him to publish on the topic for the last two decades and is an authority on the subject.

The existing studies on partition, mostly on Northern India, presented the problem as communal in terms of Muslim-Hindu relations. But, the scholar believes that this was possible because the Dalits of UP and Punjab did not identify with Hindu nationalism and were not targets of violence. But, the situation in pre-partition Bengal was different. It is for the first time that a popular historian and social scientist has brought out the real categories into focus through an analysis of the realistic and lived conditions of caste in the subcontinent and not in terms of the imagined European class. Accor-ding to him, “we need to introduce the category of caste into this discussion as the Dalits participated actively in partition politics and they were equally victims and perpetrators of violence†. Dalit participation in partition politics and Dalit-Muslim and Dalit-Hindu relationships will have to be understood within this hetero-geneous context of political response to the fast changing historical contingencies.

The Dalit identity politics in the colonial period started around the 1870s and was intimately connected with two Dalit groups, Namasudra and Rajbanshi, in Bengal. They are numerically strong, despite depredate assimilation by the dominant religious conversions. West Bengal today has the second largest concentration of the Scheduled Caste population in India. Yet, we have very limited information and analytical studies due to the circumstances that the scholar has narrated in his lecture. The two numerically large castes, Namasudras and Rajbanshis, are spread into two geographical regions in pre-partition Bengal, the former in Bakarganj, Faridpur, Jessore and Khulna, and the latter in Rangpur, Dinapur, Jalpaiguri, Coochbihar. The two castes were only presented (out of 60) in the lecture as they provided leadership to the Dalits’ struggle for land in 1872. They fought for the reclamation of the marshy lands of the Sunderbans and questioned the dominance of Brahminism with the support of the Sahajiya-vaisnav sect and started joining the mainstream nationalist movement. But, when the riots broke out in 1911 and 1930 between Hindus and Muslims, they were not a part of Hindu nationalism and therefore joined the Muslims later to fight the caste Hindu landlords. Sub-sequently, they remained silent, resulting in the Congress getting only seven seats out of 32 reserved for the Scheduled Castes in Bengal.

The communalisation of Bengal started with the Hindu Mahasabha that campaigned for the Dalit votes. The 1941 Dacca riots took place perhaps with the active participation of Namasudras. There seemed to be an internal disquiet between the Namasudras and Rajbanshis that appeared to have persisted after the emergence of Jogen-dranath Mandal and Radhanadh Das, each supporting different viewpoints. Jogendranath Mandal was a towering personality, comparable to B.R. Ambedkar in Bengal, and in fact he was elected to the Constituent Assembly from Bengal. He became the Chairman of the Drafting Commi-ttee of the Pakistan Constitution and resigned from the Parliament with disillusionment almost about the same time as Ambedkar. But, historians were unkind to him in giving him proper space in their writings.

Sekhar has narrated how Mandal took an aggressive stand against partition and a pro-Muslim stance with the argument that Dalits and Muslims are of the same economic position and a separate autonomous united Bengal would be helpful for their advancement. He was supported by the Congress’ dissident leader Sarat Chandra Bose and Muslim League leader Abul Hashem. But, Mandal became despicable for his pro-Muslim stand and his rivals Radhanadh Das and P.R. Thakur, joined the Congress to get 26 out of 30 reserved seats in 1937. By that time, the Hindu Mahasabha had a strategy to create a Hindu majority province in West Bengal and this was endorsed by the Congress at the Tarakeswar convention on April 1, 1947. The country got divided.

It is also observed that the Rajbanshis had aligned with the Communists in the Tebhaga sharecropper movement. But, it was a movement against Rajbansi jotedars by Rajbansi Adhiars (sharecroppers) and this led to rupture in the Dalit caste association. The scholar says there are different layers of social relations that converged and cut across caste, class and communal boundaries in rural Bengal and may not be unidirectional as presented by some communalists. Thus, Sekhar Badopadhyay has opened a Pandora’s Box for scholars to ponder over and contribute to the historical knowledge of the subcontinent.

The study has offered some interesting lessons for the contemporary struggles in India. It has brought out very clearly that Jogendranath Mandal’s support for partition did not solve the Dalits’ problems in Pakistan. In fact, Mandal was proved correct as he was opposing partition from the very beginning and saw how Namasudras were butchered in Noakhali. One of the greatest damages done to the Dalit solidarity in Bengal is the fragmentation of Dalits. Some were kept in East Pakistan at the time of partition without much relief and, therefore, migration took place later in waves. By 1950-51, the aggressive discourse of Islamic nationalism forced the Dalits out of Pakistan, the dominant Hindu discourse in India tended to absorb them into a ‘Hindu refugee’ identity. But, Hindu nationalism was/is not willing to offer full citizenship to them. Though the author did not mention about the problems in our eastern States and borders today, the current unrest there is due to the continuous migration of Dalits from Bangladesh.

The refugee migration of Dalits had one of the most pitiful stories of the splitting of a community in recent human history which no historian has so far recorded. It is noted by the author that the Dalit refugees were denied any land in Bengal and were dissipated into different parts of the country including the Andamans and Dandakaranya. Interestingly, the non-Dalit refugees in the beginning were accommodated in 24-Parganas and other important places in Bengal with land and support. Thus, “organised Dalit voice consequently disappeared from Bengal public sphere leading to that all-powerful political myth that caste does not matter in Bengal†.