The past has always a way of influencing the present. Each generation, nay, each historian, interprets the past from the perspective of the present because we all live in the present. If a country’s past goes back to ancient times (as in the case of India), there are bound to be many interpretations and they are bound to vary a great deal from one another. Several “myths” about our past are in circulation. While the “myths” are not real, clashes between them are very real and often affect the lives of people in many ways.
The book under review offers one eminent historian’s view of India’s past and how it had influenced the pattern of riots and communal violence in the sub-continent in the post colonial era. While the focus is on Bengal, the lessons drawn are applicable to the country as a whole.
Interrogating Politics and Society is a very valuable addition to historical scholarship on India’s recent past. Though it is a collection of the author’s articles written over the last three decades, Vice-Chancellor Suranjan Das’s erudite study is intimately relevant to the state of affairs in the country today. The introduction gives conceptual coherence to the in-depth studies of the politics, economics and social milieu of communal violence in colonial Bengal (India and also Pakistan).
As Dr. Das rightly observes Bengal’s participation in India’s freedom struggle was an intermingling of mainstream nationalism and politics of agitation. Political pendulum in colonial Bengal oscillated between nationalism, communalism and class-based politics.
One of the main arguments of the book is that the Hindu and Muslim communal mobilisations were in effect responses to the British and Western perception of Indian society as consisting of fixed identities along caste, communal, linguistic, and religious lines. Such an interpretation suited to “shore up imperial power” and “helped to convert it into a social reality”.
Partition effect Dr. Das points out that during the 1940’s and 1950’s Hindu and Muslim leaders toured the districts in Bengal, addressed public rallies and recruited cadres from the lower strata of the society. Such prolonged “propaganda” led to “psychological crystallisation” of communal identity with distinct political consciousness. Subsequent Partitionof the country and the “refugee problem” (the forced migration of millions in both directions) resulted in permanent fragmentation of the national ethos.
While significant class polarisation occurred in Bengal, at the all-India level, the nation is faced with a semi-capitalist and semi-feudal set-up where “castes and communalist vote banks” have been created. Most of the organised national political parties compete with each other using religious symbols and rituals.
Colonial interpretations of India’s history informed competing strategies of political mobilisation during the freedom struggle. However, he finds a difference between the use of history in mainstream national politics and sectarian politics. The “nationalists” fell back on the Indian past to counter the colonial discourse asserting the superiority of the West over the East.
The “sectarians” (i.e. the Hindu and Muslim religious nationalists) used history to generate monolithic identity of religiously based nation states in decolonised South Asia, according to Dr. Das. Mahatma Gandhi fought against such divisive politics throughout his life, it must be added.
Dr. Das rues the fact that “knowledge” of history was used to promote communal mobilisation rather than for the welfare of the people and the unity of the nation. As a historian he distinguishes between “subjective partisanship in historical literature and partisan history per se ”.
He makes a strong plea for the restoration of the centrality of politics in writing history and regrets the undue importance given these days to economic and socio-cultural dimensions in the name of inter-disciplinary approach to history.
While all chapters are uniformly well written and based on extensive research and reading, readers would find the chapter on the Indian National Congress and nation-building interesting and informative. According to him, the Congress party followed the strategy of “controlled mass politics and marginalisation of radicalism”.
He cites many instances from U.P., Bihar and elsewhere when Congress chose to dissociate itself from “mass turbulence” and ensured that “the freedom struggle did not threaten the economic interests of small landlords and rich peasants in the countryside and nascent Indian bourgeoisie in towns”. Thus Dr. Das reveals where he stands on interpreting the colonial and post colonial history of India. He is entitled to his version of the past.
The book deserves close study by all those interested in learning more about our recent past, its influence on the present and implications for the future.