Indian Economic & Social History

Review
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Book Reviews : JOYA CHATTERJI, Bengal Divided: Hindu

Communalism and Partition, 1932-1947, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1994, 303 pp
Indivar Kamtekar
Indian Economic Social History Review 1996; 33; 347
DOI: 10.1177/001946469603300306

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 347

because of the line drawings and photographs which accompany the

text.

Nandini Sundar

JOYA CHATTERJI, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition,

1932-1947, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, 303 pp.

This book tells the sad story of Bengal’s bhadralok. According to Chatterji,
their decline in the last fifteen years of British rule was both political and
economic. The Communal Award of 1932 gave Muslims more seats than
Hindus in Bengal’s legislature, reducing to bhadralok to a minority in an
Assembly they expected to dominate. The Government of India Act 1935
substantially expanded the electorate, pulled the mofussil into the arena,
enfranchised many rich peasants, and thus increased the importance of
Muslims in Bengal’s politics. In their effort to counter this and sustain their
position, the bhadralok leaders tried to create a unified Hindu constituency;
this forced them to solicit the support of the lower castes whom they
despised. The economic nail in the Bhadralok coffin was the Depression,
which made the predominantly Muslim peasantry of Bengal unable to
repay loans, or reluctant to part with the rent that contributed to bhadralok
income. Muslims also began to make inroads into the bhadralok share of
government jobs and their control over education.
Chatterji sees the Bengal Congress as the party of the bhadralok. It was
urban, elitist, communal, and committed to protecting zamindari rights.
While the radicals were more noisy, the conservatives were more numerous.
When this urban party needed to win a rural vote, Sarat Bose tried to shift
its programme and expand its social base; but the expulsion of the Bose
group from the Congress in 1939 confirmed its conservative and communal
character. As the Hindus were a minority in Bengal, the bhadralok feared
that democracy would damage them, and favoured minority rights and
safeguards. Therefore, measures desired by the All-India Congress were
detested by the Bengal Congress. This predicament, difficult to transcend,
kept the all-India party and the Bengal Congress out of tune.
Forced to retreat on all fronts, and fearing that their nightmare of
Muslim domination might become reality, the bhadralok abandoned their
broad nationalism for narrow communalism. This was a way of trying to
regain their influence. The bhadralok therefore supported partition. Parti-
tion was a considered Hindu choice, advocated and indeed demanded by
the Congress party, rather than a purely Muslim one, as is, commonly
believed. The crowning evidence presented for this, discovered in the

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All-India Congress Committee papers at the Nehru Museum Library in

Delhi, is a collection of petitions from Hindus in Bengal to the president of
the AICC, asking for partition. Chatterji argues that Leonard Gordon is
mistaken in attributing the pro-partition campaign to the Hindu Mahasabha:
’In fact, the Bengal Congress was the chief organiser of the campaign for
the partition of Bengal’ (p. 249). By the mid-1940s, there was little to
distinguish the Bengal Congress from the Mahasabha, in its defence of
Hindu interests. Hardly anyone had any time for the United Bengal
Scheme, promoted by Sarat Bose and Suhrawardy, quixotically envisaging
a sovereign and undivided Bengal. So the bhadralok, who had vehemently

opposed the partition of Bengal in 1905, supported it in 1947.

The first part of this book, dealing with the Communal Award and the
Government of India Act, follows the lines of argument set out in the
epilogue of J.H. Broomfield’s Elite Conflict in a Plural Society: Twentieth
Century Bengal (Berkeley, 1968), where he describes ’legislative attacks’
on bhadralok power. Here the analysis is on the whole convincing, though
in addition to legislatures and local institutions, there is also a case for
looking at trade unions, student associations, the Communist Party of
India, and the leadership of mass movements: many of the bhadralok
peered away from legislative politics, and that should form part of this
story. The indices of economic decline also need to be identified. Was the
bulk of bhadralok income from land, or from salaries? The Depression,
with its fall in food prices, was not such a catastrophe for Indians with
salaries in the cities; rather, it was wartime inflation which hurt the salaried
classes (but the war also increased employment, benefiting the unemployed
among the bhadralok). Some account needs to be taken of the impact of
the war, and greater account needs to be taken of differentiation within the
bhadralok. What is documented and brought out extremely well is the
specificity of the Bengal Congress, its contradictions and contortions, and
the conflicts with the Congress High Command. In short, the decline
hypothesis is plausible, but needs a firmer backing, especially of economic
history.
The argument on Hindu communalism is interesting and sharp. Rather
than positing a shift from nationalism to communalism, it is, however,
better to see the two as coexisting: during 1946 both exploded in demon-
strations and riots on the streets of Calcutta. Many of Bengal’s Hindus
wanted partition, but did they all want it? The petitions cited are over-
whelmingly from areas in Hindu-majority West Bengal. This is logical, as
the bhadralok of Muslim-majority East Bengal were unlikely to be enthusi-
astic about a partition which might endanger their zamindaris. What was
the reasoning of those Hindus who did desire partition? Previous work has
emphasised the immediate political impact of the 1946 killings, suggesting
that the Great Calcutta Killing made Hindus feel unsafe; Chatterji, by
contrast, emphasises a longer process of bhadralok decline.

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The Hindu demand for partition came, however, very late in the day, in
the last months of British rule. This is all-important. The situations in 1905
and 1947 were completely different. 1905 concerned the partition of a
province; 1947 concerned the partition of a nation. If the bhadralok
demanded the partition of Bengal in 1947, it was because they believed the
partition of India to be inevitable (the demand for a United Independent
Bengal was a non-starter). They were not asking for the partition of the
country, but for the partition of the province if the country was to be
partitioned. To miss the conditionality of the demand is to misjudge the
whole issue. The burning question, and the real choice before the bhadralok,
was whether they were to be part of the Indian or Pakistani states, and
their desire for the division of the province must be viewed in this context.
It did not mean that they wanted to partition India; it meant that they did
not want to be part of Pakistan.
Bengal Divided is a thought-provoking and valuable book. With refreshing
skepticism, it questions the self-image of the social group studied. Sources
like the Bengal Police records and the Bengal Home Department records
are fruitfully used, with abundant detail lucidly presented. The book offers
a clear and coherent-if partially disputable-thesis. It succeeds in placing
bhadralok decline and bhadralok communalism firmly on the research
agenda. This work establishes the author as an authority on modern
Bengal’s political history. The author claims that the originality of her
work lies in looking at partition from a provincial point of view, and at the
role Hindu communalism played. Yet her work also reminds us to look,
not just at why the dramatic events of 1947 happened, but at what happened
to the people who could do little about them.

Indivar Kamtekar
Centre for Historical Studies
Jawaharlal Nehru University

EUGENE F. IRSCHICK, Dialogue and History: Constructing South India,

1795-1895, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1994.

The author of this book questions the argument put forward by such
scholars as Edward Said that the view constructed in the colonial period of
the local society was a product of European values imposed on a subordinate
colonised society. By analysing how people created knowledge regarding
space and cultural identity in a south Indian district, later called Chingelput,
Dr Irschick instead convincingly demonstrates that the British and
local
agricultural groups interacted in this heteroglot and dialogic process of
cultural formation and that, therefore, the view thus formed was neither

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