Veiled Nation and Whose “Awakening”: Bengal Partition and Universality of Gandhian Nationalism

“The Swadeshi movement was inaugurated. People, young and old, used to run away at the sight of an English face; it now no longer awes them. They do not fear even a row, or being imprisoned. Some of the best sons of India are at present in banishment. This is something different from mere petitioning. Thus are the people moved.” -  M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj

This massive claim came at the time of predicament in partition ethos where the historical consciousness of communal integrity condensed down to picturise a rift in whole social body of the nation. Gandhi’s understanding of “the people” as in emerged through anti-colonialist interventions produced an “essentialised” coherent subject. The produced native subject therein corresponds or rather extends what Inden articulated as “committed to a curious and contradictory mixture of societalism, in which Indian actions are attributed to social groups - caste, village, linguistic region, religion and joint family - because there are no individuals in India, and individualism, in which Indians' acts are attributed to bad motives”, referring to the conglomerative nature of the society and the nationalist subjects. This leads us to the limits of universalism as a philosophical revelation which puts a veil on the interests of certain social groups. The common vocabulary in such regards, observed by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, that the dominant/ruling ideas of an era are the ideas of ruling class (here, the bourgeois class). Similarly, the whole spirit of national unity becomes a universal vocabulary through which the dominant social group not only preserves but secures their contingent interests as the most viable narrative. 

Therefore, precisely at this juncture, the interaction with Joya Chatterjee’s Bengal Divided can be put in interaction which dismantles the presumption of that “essential subject”. The people are not pre-political or pre-exist politics but they’re assembled in discrepancy within the domain. The Communal Award distribution resulted in giving 80 seats to the Hindu population including the depressed caste, comprising 32 percent of the total representation as opposed to Muslims who were given 119 seats constituting a majority of 47.8 percent of total seats in the Assembly (also 10 seats to be reserved for the depressed caste which makes the caste Hindu to occupy only 70 seats). 

The arrangement of the Communal Awards sparked intensified outrage amongst the Bhadraloks, especially, after the consequent factionalism of Bengal Provincial Congress Committee (BPCC), which the Award succeeded in regaining the unity. Gandhi’s claim that “the real awakening took place after the Partition of Bengal” can be considered true but only to the extent that it acted as a re-unifying agent in the interiorised politics of Bengal Congress machinery or local/Provincial administrative bodies which was unequivocally dominated by the Bhadralok or Caste Hindu communities. The major setback from their perception came with a rationale that the previously well placed dominance in local legislative bodies could never be translated into control at the provincial level (as Chatterji puts it).

The most interesting counter-narrative that had been set against this provision was not at all grounded on the basis of standard liberal nationalist critique as Gandhi himself anticipated or proclaimed for that matter, the critique wasn’t invoked against the imperialist policies of separate electorates and not of anti-colonial nature. The imagination for a unified political action against the partition was quite limited in its end. Chatterji states that “while the rest of nationalist India was rejecting the 'autonomy' outlined in the Government's White Paper as a sham, the Bengali bhadralok - Congressmen and non-Congressmen alike - were concerned only with its disregard of their own provincial political ambitions”, the antagonism was duly targeted towards the main beneficiaries of this Award, the Bengali Muslims. The Anti-Award rhetoric was also very articulate in expressing its rage against the Muslim communities of Bengal, not to deny the fact that there was almost no critique against the Europeans who enjoyed an exorbitantly disproportionate percentage of seat shares with the same Assembly representative arrangement, almost occupying 10 percent of total seat shares with 25 seats (the European group constituted less than 1 percent of Bengal population)

Gandhi in Noakhali 

According to Gandhi, the people of Bengal discovered that “petitions must be backed up by force, and that they must be capable of suffering”, where it produced both national awakening and fratricidal fragmentation. Therefore, this lens often imagines Partition as a moral-political pedagogy, the oppressive policies generates political excess, suffering produces solidarity and resistance transforms subjectivity into nation-hood. The contrast can be drawn from the fact that the community claiming a “cultural superiority” had a contradicting nationalist strategy, as BC Chatterjee from Hindu Sabha stated that, 'the outflowering of the Bengalee Hindu genius, and the upbuilding of Bengal's new civilisation and culture has been the outstanding phenomenon of British India' and the understanding of freedom struggle soon changed it’s vocabulary, wherein the Battle of Plassey was now seen from the lens of liberation from Muslim “tyranny” and British rule as a liberating agent which created a creative environment for the “Genius Bengalee Hindu”.

The question of “culture” here also becomes quite important because it was well demarcated not only against the “intellectually backward” cultural ethos of Musalmans in Bengal, especially, the ones from mofussul region (from the perception of caste Hindus) but also quite alienating from the other conglomeration within the community, as Chatterji puts it, “it was a cultural tradition that hardly touched the lives of the nominally Hindu castes and tribes on the margins of polite society, such as the Santals, Bagdis and Bauris, and was far removed from the practice of the lower and intermediary castes, such as the Namasudras, Rajbangshis, Mahishyas, Sahas, Sadgops and Kaibarttas, who in fact, made up the vast mass of Bengal's Hindu population”.  

It was therefore the “cultural backwardness” which actually provoked a newer idiom to communitarian identity in the then Bengal. The second partition of Bengal therefore occurred after an organised antagonism which essentially demanded for the vivisection of the entire “territoriality” (here, in the sense that it doesn’t merely connote the physical bifurcation of boundaries but the intangibility of multivalent cultural insignia attested to it) between two Bengals. The Gandhian understanding of “the people” was never politically homogenous one. It can be said without contestation that partition was more than just separatist politics of Musalman but an articulative attempt by the Bhadralok community so as to procure its capacity to translate their localised sovereignty over legislation into a provincialised one. 

To make the point further, reading of Md. Mahbubar Rahman and Willem van Schendel’s seminal article, “I Am Not a Refugee: Rethinking Partition Migration” , fundamentally unsettles Gandhian epistemological frame through which partition has been viewed. The political appeal in the Hind Swaraj has been profound towards the act of Nation being born, but Rahman and van Schendel recovers the lifeworld, frictional mobilities and regional asymmetries that the conventional nationalist reading of Partition tends to erase or take for granted. The Gandhian nationalism or the Congress oriented nationalism assumes the intervention creating collective consciousness but the article demonstrates the historical actors inhabiting the injury from varied social locations.

The Partition produced no singularity of political subjects which is quite evidential from the empirical work done from this article located a category of migrants with completely differential location of sociality during Partition, mainly identified as “optees” (state employees migrating across borders) and apart from that there were multiple group of migrants such as cross border settlers still continuing the older patterns of marriage/locality, labour migrants searching for better working opportunities, ideological migrants joining across border as a mode of inhabiting solidarity and border refugees maintaining social ties. Therefore, it diverts from the nationalist symbolic connotation of Bengal towards an ethnographic direction. The nationalist narrative, here, appropriates the local struggle which were majorly attested to the experiential categories of “non-caste Hindus” which doesn’t takes the account of political economy. The socially upward mobility was also a reality to some of these communities due to enhanced access to employment, transferable skills and property exchanges. 

The saga of the migration of Namasudra lower caste refugees from Dandakaranya to Marichjhapi and their subsequent massacre is one of denial, deprivation and state-sponsored annihilation of Dalits that has few parallels in post independence Indian history. Representative image. Photo: Youtube 

The second Bengal Partition partially functioned as the unconscious of nationalism, as a repressed contradiction that nationalist moral vocabularies could not absorb in entirety. The rhetoric of “the people” associated with the idea of universal nation concealed the social hierarchies of a particular group of landed gentries over other marginalised communities. The Gandhian emphasize was laid more on the grouds of ethical reconciliation than the liberal constitutionality, devoid of federal balance and minority confidence building. 

Conclusively, it can be demonstrated that Gandhi’s formulation of Partition of Bengal as the “real awakening” should be contested on the basis of its historicity and needs to be perceived from the lens of situating it within the ideological grammar of nationalistic narration. The Gandhian mode of reading the event transforms the inherently uneven social conflict into the redemptive idiom of nation becoming. What actually significant emerges out of it, is a wider scope for a philosophical lesson about the drawbacks of universalism in anti-colonial thought and praxis. The category of “people” can serve the emancipatory service but also contains within itself the possibilities of concealing interiorised domination by presenting the interests of socially ascendants as the destiny for all, like the inconclusive friction between egalitarian/liberatory rhetoric and hierarchical social reality. 

This, however, is not to deny the anti-colonial significance of Gandhi through this critique but to provincialise his epistemologies. The moral and reconciliatory invocation still remains an indispensable element for understanding the vital appealing function of ethical aspirations of freedom struggles. Yet, the historicity demands that such appealing functions be read alongside material and social inequalities which they couldn’t adequately resolve. The story of second partition, especially, compels us to move beyond the former narrative to a complex account of nation-building constitutively entangled in emancipation and exclusion. 

REFERENCES

• Gandhi, M.K. (1938). Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule. Navjivan Publishing House. 

• Chatterji, J. (1994). Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition. Cambridge University Press. 

• Rahman, M. & Schendel, W. (2003). Modern Asian Studies. ‘I Am Not a Refugee’: Rethinking Partition Migration. Cambridge University Press. pp. 551-584.

•  Ronald Inden, 'Orientalist Constructions of India', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 20, 3, 1986, p. 403. 

• Marx, K. and Engels, F. The German Ideology. Edited by C.J. Arthur, International Publishers, 1970.