PDF Different Nationalisms Bengal 1905 1947 Semanti Ghosh Ebook Full Chapter

Different Nationalisms: Bengal,
1905–1947 Semanti Ghosh

Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/different-nationalisms-bengal-1905-1947-semanti-gho
sh/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...
Laterites of the Bengal Basin: Characterization,

Geochronology and Evolution Sandipan Ghosh
https://textbookfull.com/product/laterites-of-the-bengal-basin-
characterization-geochronology-and-evolution-sandipan-ghosh/
Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas
https://textbookfull.com/product/biota-grow-2c-gather-2c-cook-
loucas/
The Rise and Fall of Russia s Far Eastern Republic 1905

1922 Nationalisms Imperialisms and Regionalisms in and
after the Russian Empire Ivan Sablin
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-rise-and-fall-of-russia-s-
far-eastern-republic-1905-1922-nationalisms-imperialisms-and-
regionalisms-in-and-after-the-russian-empire-ivan-sablin/
Climate Change Adaptation and Forest Dependent

Communities: An Analytical Perspective of Different
Agro-Climatic Regions of West Bengal, India 1st Edition
Jyotish Prakash Basu (Auth.)
https://textbookfull.com/product/climate-change-adaptation-and-
forest-dependent-communities-an-analytical-perspective-of-
different-agro-climatic-regions-of-west-bengal-india-1st-edition-
Language, Vernacular Discourse and Nationalisms Finex
Ndhlovu
https://textbookfull.com/product/language-vernacular-discourse-
and-nationalisms-finex-ndhlovu/
Gun Island Ghosh Amitav
https://textbookfull.com/product/gun-island-ghosh-amitav/
The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 1st Edition Mark D.

Steinberg
https://textbookfull.com/product/the-russian-
revolution-1905-1921-1st-edition-mark-d-steinberg/
Cypriot Nationalisms in Context: History, Identity and

Politics Thekla Kyritsi
https://textbookfull.com/product/cypriot-nationalisms-in-context-
history-identity-and-politics-thekla-kyritsi/
Mathematics and Computing Debdas Ghosh
https://textbookfull.com/product/mathematics-and-computing-
debdas-ghosh/
Title Pages
Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947

Semanti Ghosh
Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468232
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2016
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468232.001.0001
Title Pages
Semanti Ghosh
(p.i) Different Nationalisms (p.ii)
(p.iii) Different Nationalisms
(p.iv)
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered
trademark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.
Published in India by
Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, 1 Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001, India
© Oxford University Press 2017
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
First Edition published in 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in
Page 1 of 2
Title Pages
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as
expressly permitted
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate
reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the
scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University
Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-946823-2
ISBN-10: 0-19-946823-0
Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 10.5/12.5

by The Graphics Solution, New Delhi 110 092
Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd
Page 2 of 2
Dedication

Semanti Ghosh

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468232
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468232.001.0001
Dedication
Semanti Ghosh
(p.v)
To My Parents
(p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Abbreviations

Semanti Ghosh

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468232
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468232.001.0001
(p.ix) Abbreviations
Semanti Ghosh
AICC
All India Congress Committee
AIML
All India Muslim League
BLAP
Bengal Legislative Assembly Proceedings
BLCP
Bengal Legislative Council Proceedings
BPCC
Bengal Provincial Congress Committee
BPML
Bengal Provincial Muslim League
CPI
Communist Party of India
IOL
India Office Library
IOR
India Office Records
KPP
Krishak Praja Party
NAI
National Archives of India
WBSA
West Bengal State Archives
(p.x)
Page 1 of 2
Acknowledgements

Semanti Ghosh

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468232
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468232.001.0001
(p.xi) Acknowledgements
Semanti Ghosh
This book first took shape as a doctoral thesis presented to Tufts University
(Medford, Massachusetts, USA) in 1999. Evidently, it has been a long journey. I
have incurred so many debts of gratitude during this journey that to thank
everyone adequately seems to be a challenging task.
The greatest debt, of course, has been to Sugata Bose, my supervisor at Tufts
University during 1995–9. He has been supporting the project since it was
launched. His scholarly insight has guided me in shaping the arguments of this
book in a vital way. Also, while writing the book, he provided me with help and
encouragement of the kind that went beyond the usual call of duty. Ayesha Jalal
has been another pillar of support during all these years. Her appreciation of my
work will remain a source of inspiration to me.
The research that has gone into this book was funded by a dissertation grant
(1996–7) awarded by the South Asia Programme, Social Science Research
Council (SSRC), New York. I am grateful to SSRC and the Ford Foundation for
offering me the support to conduct research in (p.xii) Bangladesh and West
Bengal, India. I was also fortunate to receive a generously funded write-up
fellowship from Tufts University in 1998–9. I had the opportunity of presenting
parts of the thesis at the SSRC conference in Bangladesh in 1996, and at a
number of conferences organized by the Center for South Asian and Indian
Ocean Studies at Tufts University between 1997 and 1999.
Working in the archives and libraries in search of source materials was not
always a fun experience. I remember with deep gratitude the patient assistance
provided by the librarians and staff at the following institutions: in London, UK,
at the India Office Library (now part of the Oriental and India Office Collections
Page 1 of 4
Acknowledgements
at the British Library); in New Delhi, at the National Archives of India; in

Kolkata, at the West Bengal State Archives, the National Library, and the
Bangiya Sahitya Parishat Library; in Bangladesh, at the Bangladesh National
Archives, Bangla Academy, and Dhaka University Library in Dhaka, the Barendra
Museum in Rajshahi, the Chittagong University Library and Museum in
Chittagong, and the Mymensingh Public Library in Mymensingh. I was
particularly fortunate in receiving short-term affiliations from the Asiatic Society
of Bangladesh and Bangla Academy in Dhaka. During my stay in Bangladesh, I
benefited greatly from the long discussion sessions with insightful scholars and
writers such as the late Salahuddin Ahmed, Anisuzzaman, Mustafa Nurul Islam,
Abul Momen, Jamil Chaudhuri, Mofidul Haque, and Shamsuzzaman Khan. My
research assistants, Hasan and Apu in Dhaka, and Mohua in Kolkata, were
staunchly by my side during the frantic times spent in the archives and libraries.
Outside the libraries, the endless critical engagements with Maitreesh Ghatak
were helpful in shaping my arguments. I fondly remember how the time spent
with Chitralekha Zutshi, Prachi Deshpande, and Neeti Nair, three young
historians-in-the-making at Tufts in the late 1990s, stimulated new ideas and
helped to make old ones clearer. My thanks to Modhumita Roy, who teaches
English Literature at Tufts yet possesses an enviable grip on Bengali culture and
literature, for taking an interest in this work. I am grateful to David Ludden for
his generous comments when I ‘defended’ my dissertation in 1999.
No words of gratitude can be enough for the wonderfully generous Nahas Khalil,
Rupa Sayef, and Saif-ud-daula who opened their home to me in Dhaka and made
me a part of their extended family ever since. During the last stage of my
doctoral research, Sumita and Somnath Basu offered a sort of lavish hospitality
which one can never repay.
(p.xiii) While processing the book more than a decade after the PhD chapter, I
have received invaluable help from Swapan Majumdar, Indrajit Chaudhury,
Rushati Sen, Biswajit Ray, Jayanta Sengupta, Kumar Rana, and Arun
Bandyopadhyay in Kolkata, Pias Majid and Arun Basu in Dhaka, and Mou
Banerjee in Cambridge, USA. Indrajit Chaudhury, in particular, has been
absolutely tireless in lending me books from his own collection. Saktidas Ray,
who is in charge of the Anandabazar Patrika library and archives, has been a
great support. The late Asoke Sen read through parts of an early draft and gave
me precious advice. His wish to see this book in print had to remain unfulfilled,
but various parts of this book indeed bear marks of his engagement. I am
grateful to Sekhar Bandyopadhyay for writing a very encouraging review of my
previous book comprising Bengali articles (2012) based on this research. My
special thanks to Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a caring friend who never refuses to
be a mentor when I need one. Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rochona Majumdar have
provided support in many more ways than they would give themselves credit for.
I am especially indebted to Anirban Bandyopadhyay who has taken a great deal
Page 2 of 4
Acknowledgements
of time off his own work to help me out on numerous instances. Madhuparna
Banerjee proofread an earlier version of the manuscript and helped me improve
the text.
My sincere gratitude goes to the editorial team of Oxford University Press, New
Delhi, for their endless patience and care for this project. The book has
benefited substantially from the generous yet critical comments made by two
anonymous reviewers.
This book would simply not have been possible without the support of Anirban
Chattopadhyay, the editor of Anandabazar Patrika and the head of its Editorial
Department, where I have been working for the past one and a half decades. It is
he who gave me his encouragement unsparingly and provided me with the space
to pursue my dream.
Friends have always been a very important part of my life as well as this book,
which has seen its making through various phases in Boston, Chicago, London,
Dhaka, and Kolkata. Shreemantee Chaudhury, Sreeroopa Sarkar, Abanti Ghosh,
Bidisha Ghosh Biswas, Bidisha Mukherjee, Ranjini Lahiri, Paromita Ghosh
Majumdar, Rajashi Mukhopadhyay, Niaz Majumdar, Damayanti Datta, Tuli
Banerjee, Aveek Majumdar, Pratik Chakrabarti, Indrajit Ray, Bhaswati
Chatterjee, Srobona Bose Dutta, Madhumita Nag, Amitava Gupta, Siladitya Sen,
Rangan Chakravarty, Paromita Chakrabarti, Sunandan Chakraborty, Sreemoti
Mukherjee-Roy, Ananda Roy, Tisa Biswas, Sahana Ghosh, and Swachchashila
Basu all had unflagging faith in me. The support (p.xiv) and affection of my
sister, Sravanti Bhowmik, brother-in-law, Someswar Bhowmik, and the family of
my sister-in-law, Ditipriya Sarkar, have always provided me with cherished
shelter. Srotaswini, my niece, never failed to be a source of joy and pride.
Disha Manaswini and Dariya Tarangini have now spent almost all of their lives
hearing about this book being in the making. While both of them patiently
shared their mother with this book, I cannot imagine writing it without having
them as my most adorable distraction on a daily basis. Tridibesh Bandyopadhyay
knows how much I owe him. His unshakeable support and quiet nudging made
this book possible.
Since when I was a little girl, my parents, Sankha Ghosh and Pratima Ghosh,
have been teaching me the value of respecting difference in every sphere of life.
My interest in the social and cultural history of pre-partition Bengal was also
aroused by their own lively interest in the subject. Their faith in me has been an
abiding source of strength throughout. I dedicate this book to them.
Kolkata
30 June 2016
Page 3 of 4
Introduction

Semanti Ghosh

Print ISBN-13: 9780199468232
DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468232.001.0001
Introduction
Semanti Ghosh
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199468232.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter lays out the scope of the book, asserting that the period between
the partition of Bengal in 1907 and the Partition of India in 1947 was witness to
a unique experience of imagining ‘nations’ in Bengal. The lynchpin for all these
contesting nationalisms was the notion of ‘difference’. These alternative
imaginings of the nation could hardly be deemed ‘anti-national’ even if the
dominant discourse on the nation-state might wish to label them as such. Even
within communities, the ties between nation and community were variously
conceived by different strands and internal differences within communities
generated multiple articulations of nationalism. The introduction then specifies
one of the main objectives of the book, which is to explore the varied ways in
which ‘difference’ was problematized, to move beyond the unwarrantedly
essentialized form in which it is commonly understood, or, worse still, dismissed
out of the domain of engaged historical scholarship.
Keywords: nation, nationalism, difference, community, partition of Bengal, Partition of India, internal
differences, historiography
This book is about the scope and possibilities of nationalism in Bengal between
1905 and 1947. The period between the partition of the province in 1905 and the
great Partition dividing the province as well as the country in 1947 was witness
to a unique experience of imagining ‘nations’ in Bengal. I use the term in plural
deliberately. There indeed emerged many contested visions of nationhood and
alternative frameworks for its realization, producing a richly nuanced discourse.
This book explores the process by which an overarching concept of a grand,
unifying nation came to be haunted and challenged by various ‘other’
Page 1 of 24
Introduction
nationalisms, based on ‘other identities’, or ‘other kinds’ of ideological

formulations. The lynchpin for all these contesting nationalisms was the notion
of ‘difference’, which emerges within any perceived nation and counters the
ambitious claims from within any conceivable nation. These alternative
imaginings of the nation could hardly be deemed ‘anti-national’ even if the
dominant discourse on the nation-state might wish to label them as such.
(p.2) Although nationalism has been an over-explored problematic in the

historiography of South Asia in general, and colonial Bengal in particular, the
multiple perspectives on nation were often glossed over. The terms ‘nation’ and
‘nationalism’ have usually been considered in a one-dimensional way. The central
problematic of this book is to question this customary assumption. It intends to
break up this one-dimensional or un-problematized category of nationalism to
unravel its myriad internal imaginaries. When I read about the relationships
between colonialism, anti-colonial nationalism, and the assertions of cultural
difference, I often found myself in deep discomfort as it seemed impossible for
me to overlook the very fundamental dissimilarities in the ways these
relationships had been perceived by the Bengali nationalists. They were
nationalists, no doubt, but their nations appeared so very different from each
other. I wanted to probe deeper into the matter of whether these nations only
appeared so, or if in reality too they denoted different qualifiers. At the same
time, when I read about the competing definitions of identity, and the so-called
oppositional connection between these identities and the claims to nationhood, I
felt somewhat perplexed by not being able to analyse many Bengali politicians
and ideologues who combined their nations with the claims of identity rather
deliberately. This sense of bewilderment has motivated me in pursuing this study
of the contesting and contending voices of Bengali nationalism, both its Hindu
and Muslim variants. In the course of my study, I could appreciate what Sumit
Sarkar indicated a few years ago to be the most valuable legacy of nationalism:
‘self-criticism, debate, internal dissent’.1 Also, the study revealed that there
existed certain patterns amidst the dissenting voices, as well as certain
alternative structures of national politics and ideology. It suggested that the
historiographical neglect of these variations has not, perhaps, helped us to
assess the value of ‘difference’. The point is not that differences have so far been
ignored or overlooked, but that they might have been overemphasized as
difference alone. I have tried to show that it is possible to think and write about
multiple nationalisms in Bengal, some of which, instead of dismissing difference,
often accepted them and sought to forge a space for negotiating with them.
By questioning the singularity of nationalism, my book also aims to address a

few historical assumptions related to this. Some of these questions have already
proved to be particularly vexing in the historiography of South Asia. My study of
Bengali nationalism once again confronts the supreme urgency of these
questions, the first one being the nature of communities. That it is rather
uncharitable to relegate all references (p.3) to community as ‘communal’
Page 2 of 24
Introduction
ideology, and dismiss them as antithetical to nationalism, is now a well-heard

argument.2 Ayesha Jalal argues, ‘The problem of difference in South Asia …
cannot begin to be addressed without forsaking the dichotomies between
“secular” and “religious” as well as “nationalism” and “communalism”.’3 By
taking up this important question once again, this book gestures towards very
distinct and powerful imaginations of ‘nation’ by Bengal Muslims, in which
community relates to nation in ways far from antithetical. In constituting this
imaginary of the community, premised, among other things, on ‘religious–
cultural’ markers, the Bengali Muslims did not rule out the possibilities of
negotiating with ‘regional’ or broader ‘national’ identities. This book claims that
community consciousness is neither definitionally closed to nationalist
consciousness, nor must it be collapsed into it. The ties between nation and
community were variously conceived by different strands within the community.
These internal differences within a community generated multiple articulations
of nationalism.
It is, therefore, counterproductive to envisage communal ideology as the

exclusive site where notions of community and religion manifest themselves. The
community as a whole never constituted an alternative nation. On the contrary, it
is crucially important to reclaim the alternative, often mutually conflicting,
imaginaries of the possible nation from within the folds of the community. Indeed
a major objective of this work is to explore the varied ways in which ‘difference’
was problematized, to move beyond the unwarrantedly essentialized form in
which it is commonly understood or, worse still, dismissed out of the domain of
engaged historical scholarship.
The second question this study finds critical in this context is the relationship
between the ‘nation’ and the ‘region’, as well as the practicality and worth of the
‘region–nation’, if any. This book finds that regional, that is, ‘Bengali’ identity
indeed formed the axis around which a number of these nationalist articulations
revolved. Among both the Bengali Hindu and the Bengali Muslim strands of
national imaginings, ‘region’ remained a critical constituent, with all its
linguistic and cultural particularities, primarily as a space for common national
belonging for different communities. Such was the potency of the linguistic–
regional nation imaginary that it could, and arguably did, offer eminently
possible solutions to the complex challenges of the supra-regional nation.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that there was one particular strand of
regional nationalism as such which pitted itself against any supra-regional
nationalism. ‘Bengali nationalism’ was hardly ever consciously (p.4) and
coherently styled as the competing ground against Indian nationalism. Various
diverse strands of nationalism, each foregrounding and espousing the regional
identity, negotiated between themselves. The regional identity itself was thus
distributed across multiple articulations, resulting in a number of parallel
nationalistic perspectives, which were eventually appropriated by the all-India
Page 3 of 24
Introduction
singular nationalism in its urge to co-opt and then mobilize the abundant energy
of the linguistic–national spirit.
All this makes clear that the ‘other’ identities like region and religion did not
always necessarily impede the cause of nationalism in an absolutely antagonistic
manner. In fact, they often assisted the realized experience of the nation at key
moments of its articulation. There is no dispute that the eventual failure of these
alternative formulations is a historical fact. But it is also important not to
overemphasize this failure. It remains an important task for the postcolonial
historian to recover the salience of the difference in the different, as this book
will argue. In pursuing the task, this book aims to be more than yet another
review of Bengali Muslim history, or an apology for the religiously informed
cultural identities. At the same time, in spite of its exploration of the concept of
regional nation in Bengal, this study does not intend to make a case for a
Bengali nationalism as constitutively antagonistic to Indian nationalism. The
purpose here is to highlight the immense, and immensely rich, possibilities of
anti-colonial nationalism, and show a trajectory by which the creed of an
overarching singular nationalism eventually eclipsed these ‘other’ nations. Of
course, the inscrutabilities of Indian postcolonial experiences are well worth the
exercise of revisiting these alternative ‘national’ possibilities working
themselves out during the colonial period.4
Exploding Nationalism5
The notion of the colonial state had once brought with it strong ideas of
singularity by its conception of the nation-state. That import of singular
significance was responded to with a counter-ideology called ‘nationalism’
through subsequent mediations of various processes of incremental and
qualified reception. Not unnaturally, this counter-ideology in its turn
foregrounded an analogous spirit of oneness in its social and political
aspirations. However, within and outside this imported creed of the singular
nation, the material reality of colonial India did not match the elevated conceit of
‘one nationalism’ in its projected uniform (p.5) march towards ‘progress’ or
‘equality’ or ‘empowerment’. This process of engaged reception was, therefore,
characterized throughout by multiple ideologies and made for irreversible
manifestations of multiple nationalisms in its course. Therein lay the paradox,
right at the crossroads of the conflicting impulses of grand, uni-centric
nationalism and smaller nationalisms within the contradictions of singularity and
plurality.
Confronted with this paradox, most of the Indian experiences before and after
1947 have been apologetic about their ‘deviations’ from this singularity as ‘anti-
nation’ or ‘communal’. The persistent pre-occupation with ‘oneness’ led to the
labelling of all present and past visions of nation as deviant, that is, as somehow
not fully subscribing to the cherished ideal of ‘oneness’. While the story of the
intolerant, non-engaging ‘two-nation’ politics had been in constant focus during
Page 4 of 24
Introduction
the late colonial period in India, the overwhelming domination of the ‘one-nation’
nationalism has been less attended to. But, curiously, both were rather similar,
often a mirror-image of each other, in terms of their homogenizing impulse and
the consequent drive of overruling any internal variations or identities within
themselves. Just as the proponents of the infamous ‘two-nation theory’ were
completely averse to admit any other interests or identities within their
perceived boundaries of two mutually exclusive nations, the protagonists of the ‘one-
nation vision’ were equally dismissive of any rights or claims emerging from
within their projectedly self-defining and centralizing imaginary. The first part of
the story is already rectified, as it were, by nuanced historiographical
interventions. Regarding the Muslim identity in South Asia, historians have
already found it much too complex and marked by too many internal variations
to be neatly termed as ‘communalism’, readily preparing the ground of the
eventual Partition.6 However, the latter part of the story is, at best, only half-
heartedly hinted at. The task of exploding the much glorified, and vilified,
singular category of ‘nationalism’ must now be addressed in order to recover the
claims of difference from within the folds of nationalism itself.
Even the less conventional explanations of colonial nationalism, offered, for

instance, by the Subaltern Studies Collective7 against the classical
historiography of a glorified ‘nation’, fall short of this task. When the ‘fragment’
of the nation discards the concept of ‘modular nationalism’ drawn from the
Western models of nation-making exercises,8 recovering the autonomy of the
inner, spiritual domain of colonial nationalism,9 it perhaps invests an excessive
dose of autonomy within the fragment, effectively undermining its overlaps with
larger imaginings of the nation and projecting them into possible nations in (p.
6) themselves.10 The community as a challenge to the larger, and presumably
restrictive, claims of the ‘nation’ then emerges as the ‘other’ nation by itself,
which ‘can give to [itself] a historically valid justification only by claiming an
alternative nationhood with rights to an alternative state’.11 Thus Partha
Chatterjee’s ‘fragments’ can be read to lead to alternative monoliths, which
resist the further problematization of their own internal dissensions.12 The
internal dynamics of power and exploitation within the fragments tend to be
blurred, and complex realities of tension, dissension, and contestation
obfuscated. We are almost persuaded into wishing away that ‘fragments’ are
imagined communities too, that their boundaries too are likewise arbitrary and
shifting.13 We are tempted to overlook the fact that the boundaries of these
communities or ‘fragments’ are not impermeable, but organically tied with other
communities based on other identities. This book aligns itself with the view that
a shared religiosity does not by itself provide the Muslims of India an exclusive
cognitive identity or an exclusive political positioning vis-à-vis other
communities. A careful meandering through the internal configuration of
contestations within a community is most critical for locating alternative, and
complexly empowering, nationalist perspectives.
Page 5 of 24
Introduction
As a matter of fact, the much-professed aim of exploring the layered and shared
identities can be meaningful only when it addresses how, and through which
trajectories of dialogic negotiation, an individual or a collective of individuals
within a community takes on a variety of forms to imagine and prioritize their
multiple identities.14 The Bengali Muslim community, for example, represented a
reasonably well-formulated regional–religious identity within the broader
category of the Indian Muslims, but at the same time betrayed a number of
trends within itself in terms of their equation with the larger nation and
approached the problem of difference in a widely varying manner. There indeed
was a trend of Islamic exclusivism in Bengal during the 1940s. In reality, this
trend was not characteristically tied to this decade only. Even in the 1910s, we
have heard cries of ‘Islam in danger’, or desperately angry statements like the
Bengal Muslims should ‘cut off all connections with’ the Muslim League if it
associated itself with the ‘Hindu politics of Congress’.15 In short, this trend of
ultra-conservative Islamic nationalism was not a new import in Bengal. But the
existence of this trend by itself does not imply that Bengali Muslim discourse
was wholly represented by it, or that the latter was devoid of any ‘national’
interest other than its ‘Muslim’ interest. What I would like to point out is that
while the notions of nation and its structure were being (p.7) experimented
with, the primary impulse of negotiating differences for a larger cause never
disappeared. There must be a critical distinction between the communitarian
identity mobilizations and struggles in which ‘religion played an important
organizational role’, or negotiations and communal identities where ‘religion
played the role of deeper cognitive exclusion’ or separation.16 The distinction
implied here is that while the unwarranted conflation of any religiously informed
cultural or political position as being ‘communal’ needs to be avoided, it is also
critical to note the ideological or political challenge hidden in such positions
around the emphasis on their difference.
The primary focus of this book lies here. Indeed this argument runs through the
entire scope of this work. It notes that, during and after the swadeshi movement,
many Bengali Muslims relentlessly emphasized their differences with the
projected swadeshi nation and at the same time asserted their own agency and
role in the newly emerging nation. This is why leaders like Maniruzzaman
Islamabadi of eastern Bengal sought to promote a swajati andolana, akin to the
swadeshi model in its ‘national’ objectives and agenda, but carefully
distinguished from the Hindu cultural accents and urban elite preoccupations of
swadeshi. This trend continued through the following three decades to reveal its
full potential in the ideal of ‘Pakistan’ or ‘Purba Pakistan’ (East Pakistan) in the
1940s. The strong regional component of the Pakistan movement as it developed
in Bengal must be studied as an inheritance of this consistent cultural and
political positioning of extensive sections of Bengali Muslim society in the earlier
decades.17 This Bengal version of Pakistan represented a different nationalism,
struggling its way through the quagmires of colonial politics. I would point out
Page 6 of 24
Introduction
that right since the Bengali Muslim nation during the swadeshi era up to the
Pakistan politics as it developed in Bengal, there was a very strong critique and
an emphatic rejection of Congress nationalism. The typically Congress claims of
representing ‘all’ communities and classes in India was potently challenged in
these ‘other’ nationalisms. The argument heard all over was that in a country
with very diverse identities and interests, no ‘all-India’ organization could speak
for all, or at least for the very specific case of theirs. If a separate state of
Pakistan was one of the alternative structures that emerged in the course of
such opposition, there was also another, perhaps more persistent and more
cherished, imagery of nation, essentially federal in nature, conceding the space
for substantial regional autonomy.
It is by now a more or less forgotten fact of history that this idea of a ‘federal’
nation was an extremely powerful vision in colonial Bengal. (p.8) Many Bengali
Hindu and Bengali Muslim leaders have consistently underlined its absolute
naturalness and strong merits in the Indian context. In fact, the explorations of a
federal nation is another major theme that runs through this book, only to point
out that there was nothing called the Hindu nation or Hindu nationalism.18
Especially in the case of Bengal, the imaginations of nation and political
experiments with nation were only too variegated to be lumped together as a
‘Hindu’ discourse. Instead of equating the whole experience of nationalism with
the brand of nationalism espoused by the Indian National Congress, and thereby
forcing on it a complicity with Hindu majoritarianism, I would like to re-examine
its internal shades. I would try to understand nationalist thought at large and its
Congress version in particular separately but in a constant frame of association.
In a way, then, I would like to rescue nationalism from its monolithic
characterization by arguing that nationalism in Bengal indeed displayed a
remarkable insight and alacrity to handle ‘difference’. Even when it entailed a
process of ‘otherization’, it did not immediately imply that combining with the
‘others’ was impossible or undesirable. These variegated experiments of nation
must be remembered, decoded, and highlighted, as they contained within
themselves remarkable possibilities of pluralist existence against the backdrop
of identity politics.
Difference, Representation, and the Criticality of the Region

What does ‘difference’ mean in this context? Difference, a conceptual tool to be
employed against the essentialization of categories used in an aspirational or
practical context, usually plays a crucial role in distinguishing structural
complexities of nationalist constructs. Theorists often describe difference as
‘alternative fears’, as an inevitable offshoot of ‘the imagination as a social
practice’.19 With nations and nationalisms, these alternative spaces for
imagining one’s own belongings had a particularly close relationship. Moreover,
in colonial societies, difference becomes an unavoidable counter-category, since
it is on the basis of such disjuncture that national rights have to be asserted. In
Page 7 of 24
Introduction
some ways, these contending rights open the floodgates of contesting claims for
sovereignty from within the domain of an aspiring nation.
A number of constitutive dilemmas for the colonial modern subject surfaces

here.20 One among these was about the idea of difference itself. On the one
hand, difference from the colonial rulers as an ideological construct has to be
evoked to raise claims of self-assertion and self-rule. (p.9) On the other, an
erasure of difference also emerges as a necessary condition within the internal
realms of nationalism, without which the projected emergence of a modern
nation simply fails to materialize. The colonial subject is therefore condemned to
struggle for his or her right as a unified collective against the colonial ruler, and
at the same time, to resolve the reality of fragmented identities within his or her
own society. Faced with this dilemma, perceptions of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’
reveal striking quirks of imagination in unavoidable engagements with perceived
and experienced contradictions in articulation.
Once the claims of difference emerge, an urge for representation follows

inescapably.21 Representing one’s own identity and difference appears to be a
cultural process to begin with, and then a political struggle in the course of time.
Such politicization follows in order to institutionalize the individual and
collective identities as an established practice to be performed by the rules and
protocols of an emerging representative democracy, albeit in a limited form. This
process is not accidental. Rather, it can be mapped in history. The process of
representing identity carries a profoundly symbolic charge as possible clues to
existential questions of identity: Who am I? What could I be? Who do I want to
be? Discourses and systems of representation thus build spaces where
individuals imagine themselves as inhabiting a collective, from where they
launch themselves outward and speak to imagined interlocutors likewise
situated. The contestations around the axes of an imagined Bengali nation in the
first few decades of the twentieth century offer an important case study with
which to explore the process of ideological constructions of difference, to be
followed immediately by the emergence of a politics of difference, mediated in
unanticipated and unpredictable directions by the burgeoning demands of
representation of the self and the collective.22
The ‘self’ in this context does indeed assume different forms at different times,
often without any implied conflict between its potential forms. Sometimes it is
the communitarian self, sometimes it is the regional self, at other times it might
well signal a supra-regional self. Identities and the layers of the self coexist
simultaneously, side by side, manifesting themselves in varying contexts and
negotiating among themselves the pressing needs of anti-colonial nationalism.
The swadeshi movement in early twentieth-century Bengal is especially
remarkable for the very first visible change in the numerous articulations of this
self in the nationalist discourses of various shades. Not only did the number of
tracts or journals or articles suddenly soar, the kinds and degrees of articulation
Page 8 of 24
Introduction
(p.10) around themes of identity too reached an unprecedented height and

stretched to an unanticipated width at the same time. The claims to belonging to
a collectivity of any sort as well as the claims of an assertive individuality were
brought forth for the first time with so much clarity and force. This book begins
with some such resilient articulations of the swadeshi era.23
The relentless shift back and forth from the individual to the collective remains
an important characteristic of the national narratives of Bengal. In this study I
seek to map the shifting focus on the self and on the collective in nationalist
imagination. A continuous attention, therefore, is devoted to tracts and articles
written during this time by individual authors, not professedly speaking for a
clearly projected community. Beyond the customary doubts about who or what
passes for a proper and rightful representation, I find such a strategy
particularly helpful to address the complex processes of identity formation in a
fluid climate of multiple ideological formulations. Jalal had once emphasized in
the context of Muslim discourse on the need of ‘keeping a balance between the
individual and the community, [which] steers the analysis away from an
essentialization of Muslim identity and politics’.24 This strategy remains
arguably valid for all kinds of discursive history that hopes to discern the kernel
of the self-in-the-making from within messy processes of identity formulation.
Difference was not merely a ‘Muslim’ anxiety in colonial India. There were other
identities too, fashioning their own distinct claims vis-à-vis the grand narratives
of the nation. The caste discourse of Bengal was equally mediated by an
analogous charge.25 This book refers to caste discourses in the course of its
arguments, although it does not dwell upon caste politics at length. With the
focus firmly on religious and regional identities, this study underlines its
principal argument that the problematic of difference must be seen as an
unavoidable by-product of the fundamental premises of anti-colonial nationalism
itself, which aims to institutionalize a cultural performance of sovereignty
overwriting all underlying particularities. In doing this, the nationalists faced a
curious predicament in colonial Indian society, where politics of representation,
and thereby politics of enumeration, was gradually unfolding itself. On the one
hand, the urgency of reorganizing the nation’s base through greater popular
mobilization was felt more acutely in the context of the new discourse of adult
suffrage. On the other, the nation’s emphasis on the indivisibility and uniformity
was rendered more and more unfit for this new context due to the countless
claims of diversity (p.11) and difference within the larger Indian society.
Consequently, the more the nation felt the urge to broaden its base, the more it
was pushed to a quandary on the issue of difference.
It being so, an exploration of the problematic of difference can never be strictly

confined to marginal or non-hegemonic discourses. It was just as manifestly
constitutive to mainstream or hegemonic strands of nationalism, albeit informed
by a distinct set of conceptual specificities. While deriving links between nation
Page 9 of 24
Introduction
and its differences from the swadeshi days to the turbulent years of the 1940s, I
argue that the proposed schemes for managing the problem of difference in
ideology and politics of the so-called Hindu nationalists were varied and often
mutually conflicting.26 The engagements between these differences or
marginalities on the one hand and the anxiety for a nation-to-be-realized on the
other, therefore, call for some careful untangling. A major task before the
nationalist project of the Bengali Hindu was to address the challenge of
difference as the most vexing ‘problem’. The hegemonic nationalism discourse
often had to work out and recommend an urgent and modular ‘cure’ for this
‘problem’. Again, for some, this was a ‘problem’ beyond any ‘cure’, so it was
mandatory to negotiate with it. Some of them responded to the newly emerging
claims of other identities with an urge to assimilate and subsume this difference
within the contingently larger sign of the nation. Some, on the contrary, spoke
for an alternative model of the nation with sufficient space for ‘other’ identities
to proclaim themselves, that is, unprefaced by an overdetermining assimilation
under all circumstances.27 The latter were not the most devoted subscribers of
the conventional nationalist tenets, and often found themselves consigned to the
margins of history. I contend that these ‘other’ cultural or political formulations
on the nation were formidable enough not to be written off as mere deviations.
Thus, the responses of Hindu-nationalist thinkers to the question of difference

ranged from a broad universalism to inclusivism, not excluding assimilationism
or a combinational nationalism. The long-term appeal of the universalist nation
of Rabindranath Tagore could not be overestimated: his deep and relentless
engagements with the problematic of difference earn him a central place in my
narrative. There are also some relatively unfamiliar figures who deserve serious
mention because of the sincerity of their engagement with the problematic of
difference. For example, the swadeshi ventures of Aswinikumar Dutta in Barisal
represented a creed of inclusionary secular nationalism. However, it was
practically and discursively distinct from the ‘composite nationalism’ (p.12) of
Bepinchandra Pal or Aurobindo Ghose, which portrayed India as a ‘federation of
faiths’ though with a definitive emphasis on the primacy of Hindu religious–
cultural traditions. Yet another ‘different’ combinational approach was to be
found in the new nationalism of Chittaranjan Das in the mid-1920s. His Bengal
Pact might have remained incomplete as an administrative project and
controversial as a conceptual proposition, but it indubitably promised an
alternative stratagem of politics and a potentially rich paradigm of
national(izing) ideology. Read inter-textually as projections of strategic gestures
towards realizations of the nation, these ‘other’ histories may tell us a more
nuanced and much more poignant story about discursive practices in political
and ideological nation-making in colonial Bengal.
Das believed that any accommodative project of nationalist politics and culture
was not conceivable without powerful projections of the ‘region–nation’. He was
not exceptional in this regard. Nationalist ideologues or politicians of early
Page 10 of 24
Introduction
twentieth-century Bengal very often turned the focus on regional expressions

and linguistic culture, precisely because the bridging of the self and the
community in Bengali national imagination seemed more readily realizable
through the mediation of a linguistic–regional identity. The spatial–emotional
construct of the region, performed and renewed through the universally
accessible entitlement of a popular language, here provided a common platform
for a people otherwise diverse in racial constitution and historical background.
As a Bengali author has pithily written: ‘[W]ho would not accept that the
southeastern part of Bengal populated by the descendants of Mongolian tribe,
the south-western Bengalis largely coming from Dravidian lineage, and the
traditional Brahmins directly descending from the north Indian Aryan tribes and
the Bengali Mussalmans had nothing in common other than the language?’28
Language and region thus provided an immediate location of, and hence a
contesting ground for, collective belonging as compared to the remoteness of the
vision of a grandly unitary Indian nation. Following the model of the Bangiya
Sahitya Parishat of Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), founded in 1897 with an aim
to promote studies of Bengali language and literature, a group of Muslim
intellectuals introduced a literary association called the Bangiya Mussalman
Sahitya Samiti in 1918. This was a direct cultural challenge, and also a not-so-
pronounced project of fashioning a region–nation with a legitimacy provided for
the religious identity. Significantly, before such challenges, the limits of Hindu
nationalisms, even of the accommodative versions, were often exposed. When
direct claims of the ‘folk’, the ‘local’, or the (p.13) Islamic forms of language
were forcefully foregrounded, major literary stalwarts, including liberals like
Rabindranath Tagore, could not but resist.29 Nevertheless, the range of
contending perspectives on managing linguistic difference was not exhausted by
them. There were yet some others who openly enough acknowledged the need
for ‘a number of Bengali languages, rather than one standard Bengali’,30 and
emphasized the need for the language to have a life and maturity of its own,
especially during the process of nation-making. These attempts of reforming the
liberal views from within before the problematic of difference appear to be of
great significance from the nation’s perspective.31
The political expressions and cultural debates on nation also present some ‘other
moments’ of nationalist politics in Bengal. These moments were more
inclusionary or accommodative in nature. The Bengal Pact (1924) of
Chittaranjan Das mentioned earlier, the inter-community administration of Fazlul
Huq in the early 1940s, or the propositions of an inter-community provincial
administration in September 1946 or those of the ‘United, Sovereign Bengal’ of
Suhrawardy, Abul Hashim, and Sarat Bose (June 1947) were some such
moments.32 I have noted that even when the political representation in the
nation was accepted in general, there was a huge ground of contestation over
the principles of that representation, as well as over the fundamental
philosophical basis of those principles. The deep dissensions running through
Page 11 of 24
Introduction
the region would make region in the end a significant dimension in nationalist
imagining, but not a legitimate alternative nation.
Nevertheless, these dissensions made the region–nation full of potentials, but

finally also diminished its critical political charge. This being so, despite the
constant attempt of the Bengali leaders on both sides of the religious divide to
resist the singularity projected both by the Congress and the Muslim League
from the top, all the projects of regional nation finally had to surrender before
the all-India ‘national’ bodies at the time of the Partition. The larger political
contradictions of this ‘national’ story at the centre, embedded in the complicated
majority–minority questions within and outside Bengal, emerged victorious in
the end.
The ‘Climax’ of Partition?

In recent years, few other areas of academic scholarship in South Asian history
have matured faster than Partition studies. While the focus of these new studies
is on the social, cultural, economic, and psychological impact of the Bengal
partition, political history of the Partition of India (p.14) too is breaking new
ground.33 However, there is something disconcerting in the historiographical
approaches to Partition, and it can be called the ‘inevitability narrative’ for want
of a better term. Much like the classical nationalist studies, the revisionist
historiography of Partition also suffers from a tendency of drawing a straight
line of causality between the pre-1947 events and the Partition of the province
and the country in 1947.34 It is argued that ‘communalism’ was gradually rising
in the earlier decades, only to climax in the last years of colonial rule. Since
inter-community relations in the province were steadily and inevitably
deteriorating, the ‘difference’ had to be resolved only through an
institutionalized separation of political domains. This view may be seen as the
ultimate telos of sub-continental history, starting at the climax and then working
backwards, only to narrativize a linear trajectory of communal antagonism
leading irreversibly to the final rupture. This makes for a ready-made collapse of
all references to religious identity, or possibly any identity other than what is
defined as ‘national’, with bigoted antagonism, and by extension, with a creed of
separation.
Since the national and communal binary is denounced in this study at the outset,
I find this much-treaded historiographical path, a favourite construction of this
binary-driven narrative paradigm, particularly unacceptable. Such a narrative
has no patience for the Hindus and Muslims of Bengal who were keen to uphold
their own religious–cultural identities, and yet opposed to partition of any kind,
or who evoked an ardent desire for framing a new ‘federalized’ nation with or
without partition. Most importantly, it does not wait to understand, explain, or
analyse the consistent and widespread efforts of individuals and communities at
‘normalization’ of social realities working themselves out even amid a backdrop
of violence, or their frantic disbelief till the last moment at the particular
Page 12 of 24
Introduction
solution the politicians finally agreed upon. It is, therefore, hard to be persuaded
by the suggestion of the parochial and inward Bengali bhadralok classes.35 Such
a suggested paradigm does not pay enough attention to complicated discursive
and imaginary potentialities being worked out all the time until it became
impossible not to accept the fait accompli, without unacceptably high and
intense personal and collective unsettlements.36 In an attempt to underline the
enormity of this gap, this book points towards the range of options Bengali
society had been struggling with, and the implied hope and resilience that they
embodied and projected, both inwards and outwards.37
Since these trends of regional accommodation finally gave in to the demands of

extra-regional pressures, partition should be seen as an (p.15) unfortunate
deviation, an anticlimax of the history of Bengal nationalism. Rather than
marking communalism or separatism as its overwhelming backdrop, I look for its
clues in this particular disjunction. Partition in Bengal was more of a structural
impasse resulting out of the contradictions of the politics of a Hindu-majority
country and a Muslim-majority region than the unavoidable trajectories of
communal animosities unfolding themselves within the region.38
Structuring the Narratives

This book is arranged in a chronological rather than a thematic order,
presumably against current trends within the discipline. The reason is two-fold.
First, the gradual unfolding of the dilemma underlying the national imaginings
in Bengal is best studied as a continuous story running through real historical
time. Second, the ideas of belonging and representation have been integrally
made and remade in engagement with evolving political contexts. These political
contexts were powerful enough to influence and change the imagined and lived
meanings of terms such as ‘identity’, ‘community’, ‘belonging’, or
‘representation’. In exploring the interdependence of ideology and politics, it is
useful to track the evolving historical contexts over these few eventful decades.
However, while the chapters are broadly arranged in a chronological way, within
the chapters I break up the narrative into a number of themes for convenience of
analysis.
The first chapter opens with the partition of Bengal in 1905 and ends in 1911
with the revocation of that partition. Contrary to what is widely believed, the
discontent and jubilations after the announcement of the partition were not
exactly identifiable respectively with the Hindus and Muslims of the region. The
responses were far too complex for such a neat, water-tight identification. The
Bengal Muslims were deeply divided on the project of ‘nation’, and on the
possible compromises between their regional and religious identities. The Hindu
ideologues and politicians also engaged with the problem of difference with an
unprecedented intensity. Nowhere in India during this time were identity issues
so fiercely debated by the highest rungs of intelligentsia and by the common
people alike than in Bengal. The nature of the discourse shows that the support
Page 13 of 24
Introduction
for the partitioned province must not be seen as anti-nationalism, but differently
positioned nationalisms charged by a multi-dimensional Bengali identity. The
swadeshi movement, however nationalist it may have seemed at the outset,
unfortunately missed this important (p.16) opportunity of acknowledging the
claims of difference from within a nation. Swadeshi Bengal thus provides a
unique case with such early expositions of identity discourse in the aftermath of
a provincial partition. Controversies on social and cultural identities gradually
led to the debates on its political representation.
The second chapter explores the debates on constitutional representation, the

new grounds of ‘cultural politics’ during 1912–25. The imperative of deriving
political rewards on the basis of social or cultural identity began to dominate the
discourse of difference. Bengali Muslims claimed a greater share of
representation within the province, but at the same time characteristically
upheld the ‘Bengal Line’ in the all-India Muslim politics. The question of cultural
representation generated fierce debates on the forms of Bengali language. The
Bengali Hindus also elevated the discourse of difference to a higher level, taking
the vital cue from the limitations of the swadeshi experience. The more broad-
based trends of accommodative and combinational nationalisms emerged in
turn, as did a model of the federalized nation with the twin objectives of bringing
the masses within its fold and addressing different identities with greater
persuasion. If we may term these new approaches as ‘new nationalism’, Tagore
and Das should be seen as the two most insightful protagonists.
The failure of Das’s new nationalist politics set the tone of the third and fourth
decades of twentieth-century Bengal, argues the third chapter. A resurgence of
the unitary nation was matched by the hardening of the oppositional forces of
difference. The opposing viewpoints on community clashed between themselves
with an unprecedented ferocity. The political contestations took a bitter shape on
the questions of separate representation. In political as well as in cultural
realms, ‘communal’ mentality began to gain its strength vis-à-vis the
‘communitarian’ sensibilities. The latter, however, kept itself alive enough to
represent a discernible trend, and based itself critically on the regional identity.
The Bengali Muslim voices of the Shikha–Saogat groups and the Buddhir Mukti
activists39 were a case in point. In this context, the new phase of provincial
elections opened up new possibilities of linking up the less extreme trends of the
region. The rise of the Krishak Praja Party (KPP), coupled with the reorientation
of the Congress and the Muslim League, brought about a fresh charge in
popular politics in Bengal. The forces of inter-community negotiation survived
the social and political disharmony in the end, and even made new inroads into
the political realms.
One of the focal points of the fourth chapter (1937–45) is the KPP, a Muslim
middle-class organization with a dual emphasis on Bengali (p.17) identity and
the agrarian interests of cultivator (praja) classes. The electoral coalition of
Page 14 of 24
Introduction
interests in the provincial administration opened up new horizons for the region–
nation. While forming such coalitions, Bengal witnessed certain significant
moments of failure. The non-realization of the Congress–KPP alliance was the
first moment of failure because it failed to bring forth a broad-based provincial
agenda. The KPP agenda being soon hijacked and appropriated by the All India
Muslim League (AIML) signified the second lost opportunity. The third moment
of failure came when Fazlul Huq, the most accepted and charismatic leader of
the region, joined hands with the Hindu Mahasabha and consequently lost his
grip over a huge regional following. Chances of the region–nation were,
nevertheless, sustained in various imaginative ways, the most interesting of
which, albeit a bit counter-intuitive, was to be found in the project of ‘Pakistan’,
or, more correctly, in the regional twist given to the idea of Pakistan.
The fifth chapter deals with the last two years of colonial Bengal, 1946–7,
generally considered as a moment of climax of ‘communalism’ in Bengal. I
question both the notions of ‘climax’ and ‘communalism’. First, the enormously
rich and complex discourse of difference of the earlier decades cannot pass as
merely ‘communal’ in my analysis. Although there is no denying that a steady
trend of communal politics made itself pronounced in Bengal throughout,
especially in the late 1940s, but to illustrate this trend as the defining
characteristic of Bengali Muslim society would be grossly misleading. The
‘other’ trends show how fluid the Bengali society was even in the trying times of
late colonial Bengal. The final ‘breach’ in fact appeared due to the built-in
contradictions between various levels of politics, and the people were finally
forced to take sides on the abruptly devised solutions of a long-drawn
sociopolitical problem. Second, unlike the earlier decades, the political
developments of the last couple of years of colonial Bengal could no more hope
to be ‘regional’ in nature, and had to succumb before the pressures of trans-
regional forces. Bengal thus experienced an ‘anticlimax’ or a deviation from its
earlier histories of dialogic engagement with the problem of difference. All these
previous trends of dialogue were finally sidelined by an over-decisive and
centrally orchestrated process of decolonization. The creed of unitary nation was
made victorious, in the end, by defeating the alternative nations of the Bengali
imagination and by reducing the rich discourse of difference, henceforth, to a
mere footnote in the narrative of nation.
The over-deterministic historicity of the Partition of 1947 and the ‘inevitability

narrative’ associated with it have left their distinct mark (p.18) on both the
history of divided Bengal and that of the new nation-state of India. Several
scholarly studies as well as journalistic works40 have indeed noted that the dual
inheritors of Bengali identity, the Indian state of West Bengal and East Pakistan,
later to become Bangladesh, bear a double-edged connection, one of a linguistic–
cultural commonness, and the other of a lineage of disruption and distrust. This
book joins with them in locating the source, intensity, and potential of the
postcolonial conflicts in the colonial history of Bengal, and traces these
Page 15 of 24
Introduction
connections in the reality of the contesting nationalisms of that era. The decisive
assertion of a Bengali Muslim identity in the Language Movement of East
Pakistan (1952) and Mukti-juddha or War of Liberation (1971), therefore, does
not appear an essentially postcolonial development, ‘a new linguistic
nationalism’,41 or ‘the rise of Bengali nationalism’42 after 1947. It can be seen as
the logical extension of the pre-1947 trends of Bengali Muslim nationalism
conceived and realized through cultural contestations and political negotiations,
impossible to be written off as a hazy and uncertain backdrop of a communally
defined Partition of blinding importance.
Similarly, the impractical and precarious obsessions of the present Indian nation-
state with a unifying national spirit or a singular perspective of national
sovereignty, or with fetishizing a centralized model of governance over the
states, cannot call for greater urgency for historians to trace the contested pasts
of such concerns. The resilience of identity politics and demands of greater
federalization, or even of secessionist politics in some places, inexorably point
towards a counter-force lurking right beneath the surface of national society and
its politics, steadily if stealthily making its way, about to trump the menacing
trend of disregarding difference for the sake of a hyper-celebrated oneness. If
analysed from the point of view of ‘difference’ and its continuous challenge
against any overarching ‘nation’ in the pre-1947 era, this counter-force appears
only familiar and natural. The post-1947 nation-state was not the best solution,
but was only a step towards deeper confusion and greater impatience around
the question of multiple identities.
This book is the culmination of my doctoral dissertation (‘Nationalism and the

Problem of Difference, Bengal 1905–47’, Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA)
completed in 1999. However, I believe its relevance is still compelling. Many of
these postcolonial concerns and inadequacies are best understood if seen
through the optic of the nation’s tensive engagements with ‘difference’, the
principal problematic of the book. On a more personal note, my experience in
the world of Indian (p.19) journalism in the intervening years has served well
to reinforce my interest and deepen my own engagement with this problematic.
A closer look at the contemporary politics and society of India has alerted me on
a regular basis to the intransigence and intractability of the problem of
difference, and has translated my presumably distant academic engagement into
an everyday practice of conscious experience.
A final clarification is due here. The book concludes that the Partition of 1947
came more as an anticlimax than as the logical conclusion of the events
preceding it. The purpose behind this claim is not to stir up a nostalgia for
‘Bengali unity’, delve into a retrospective search of possible ways to avert a
calamitous Partition, or to offer a normative view on the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’
nations. The purpose and objective of exploring the backdrop of the non-obvious
outcome of Partition is to underscore both the cognitive and functional
Page 16 of 24
Introduction
challenges against the concept of nation in Bengal, and finally, to understand

‘difference’ not as deviation, but as an inescapable part of the order in every
sphere of life, to be attended to by sustained and sincere engagement.
Notes:
(1.) Sumit Sarkar, ‘Preface’, in The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–8 (new
edition, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2010), p. xxiii.
(2.) This was heard emphatically from Ayesha Jalal in ‘Exploding Communalism:
The Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia’, in Nationalism, Democracy and
Development: State and Politics in India, edited by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 76–103; and Self and Sovereignty:
Individual and Community in South Asian Islam Since 1850 (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2001). The argument is also made forcefully by Sugata Bose in
‘Between Monolith and Fragment: A Note on the Historiography of Nationalism
in Bengal’, in Bengal: Rethinking History, Essays in Historiography, edited by
Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (Delhi: Manohar, 2001). For the construction of a false
notion of ‘communal consciousness’ in colonial India, see Farzana Sheikh,
Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India,
1860–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). For the negation of
the existence of difference within the Muslim community in order to define a
‘Muslim’ identity in India, see Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political
Idea (London: Hurst & Company, 2013).
(3.) Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism’, p. 102.
(4.) In this context, however, it is important to remember that there is a

fundamental difference between colonial and postcolonial national experiences
of India. Between the nation as espoused by the anti-colonial nationalism in the
pre-1947 era and the nation-state that emerged in 1947, there is a vast
conceptual distance. Amartya Sen has cautioned us on the need to maintain this
distinction between the idea of a nation and the discipline of a nation-state: ‘The
concept of “nation”… is made to take on whatever abuse of power and of
violence that may be attributable to the nation-state.’ See Amartya Sen, ‘On
Interpreting India’s Past’, in Nationalism, Democracy and Development, p. 25. In
my view, the dual formulation of nation must be taken note of in its historical
analysis. In one formulation, especially in its classical nationalist use, its
aspirations of arriving at a sense of political identity which can be shared by
many, and its consequent conceptual flexibility must be noted. Such flexibility is
woefully absent in the structures of power the nation-state represents. The
second formulation of nation, ideologically wedded to the concept of the modern
nation-state, expresses the latter’s preoccupation with ‘oneness’, and thus
intends to remove all traces of heterogeneity within itself.
Page 17 of 24
Introduction
(5.) I have borrowed this phrase partially from Ayesha Jalal’s ‘Exploding
Communalism’, pp. 76–103. In this article she propounds that the multiple
articulation of difference by the South Asian anti-colonial Muslims cannot be
categorized as ‘religious communalism’ and needed to be ‘exploded’.
(6.) Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism’, and Self and Sovereignty.
(7.) The Subaltern Studies series, which started its journey in 1982, developed a
postcolonial project of writing the history of India. It discarded traditional
studies of nationalism, considering them trapped in the ‘modular’ forms of the
national society propagated by the modern West. As a corrective measure, the
subaltern histories, through various contexts and approaches, attempted to
revive autonomous forms of imagination of the community as against the nation.
(8.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Foregrounding the independence
of colonial experiences of nationalism, a famous response to Anderson’s
influential work came from Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments:
Colonial and Post-colonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993).
(9.) P. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, p. 6.
(10.) Sugata Bose points out that the fragment of nation, that is, community,
becomes troublingly singular in this analysis, and attains a legitimacy which, if
posed against the grand narrative of nation, seems to present an alternative
homogenizing category. See Sugata Bose, ‘Between Monolith and Fragment’.
(11.) P. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, p. 238.
(12.) Chatterjee’s ‘fragments’ in this respect reminds us of Guha’s famous

formulation of autonomous domains of politics, namely the elite and the
subaltern. See Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial
India’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 1, edited by Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1982). The autonomous domain of the subaltern subject in the
‘fragment’ has also been located in Gyanendra Pandey’s work on the Partition.
See his Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History of India
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
(13.) The cue may be taken from Benedict Anderson who warns us against Ernst
Gellner’s assertion that since national identity is fabricated, it must be
inherently false. Gellner thereby appeared to suggest that ‘true’ communities do
exist to which the nation can be juxtaposed. Anderson points out that
‘communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the
style in which they are imagined’ (Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 6).
Gellner’s argument that ‘nationalism is primarily a political principle, which
Page 18 of 24
Introduction
holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’, and hence it
is a theory of political legitimacy can be found in his Nations and Nationalism
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
(14.) It is indeed important to step beyond the cognitive monolith of the

community if Chatterjee’s point is to be accepted that ‘people, living in different,
contextually defined, communities, can coexist peacefully, productively and
creatively within large political units’ (Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, p.
238).
(15.) Muslim Hitaishi, December 29, Report on Native Papers in Bengal

(henceforth RNP), no. 1 of 1917, referred to in Chapter 2.
(16.) Sugata Bose, ‘Between Monolith and Fragment’, p. 288.
(17.) Whereas the Bengali Muslim identity has been well-explored so far, there is
still room for recovering its multiple constructs through difference and for
deciphering the negotiations between these constructs and the nation. Some
important studies in this context are Harun-or-Rashid, Foreshadowing
Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and Muslim Politics, 1936–1947 (Dhaka:
Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1987); Shila Sen, Muslim Politics in Bengal, 1937–
1947 (New Delhi: Impex, 1977); Taj-ul-Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia: The
Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920–1947 (New York:
Boulders, Co., 1992); Tazeen Murshid, The Sacred and the Secular: Bengal
Muslim Discourses, 1871–1977 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1995);
Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture and Islam in Colonial
Bengal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014). An important contribution on
Bengal Muslims in late-nineteenth-century Bengal is Rafiuddin Ahmed, The
Bengali Muslims, 1871–1906 (second edition, New York: Oxford University Press,
1988). Also see Asim Pada Chakrabarti, Muslim Identity and Community
Consciousness: Bengal Legislative Politics, 1912–1936 (Calcutta: Minerva,
1995); Chandiprasad Sarkar, The Bengali Muslims: A Study in Their
Politicization, 1912–1929 (Calcutta: K.P. Bagchi & Co., 1991).
(18.) Starting from the Cambridge School of historians, neo-Cambridge

historians to the subaltern historians all share this view on nationalism. See
Gordon Johnson, C.A. Bayly, and John F. Richards (gen. eds), New Cambridge
History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); John A.
Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982). The most noteworthy contribution in this
respect has been Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and
Partition, 1932–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also
Bidyut Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932–1947 (London:
Routledge, 2004). The historians of Bengal Muslim politics also have
corroborated this from the other end; see Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region.
Page 19 of 24
Introduction
(19.) Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural

Economy’, in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 28.
(20.) A remarkable insight on the dilemma of colonial modernity was offered by

Partha Chatterjee in Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative
Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986), followed by his Nation and Its
Fragments. For the extremely rich theoretical perspectives on ‘difference’ in the
context of Indian history, see Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the
Historiography of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies, vol. 1; Homi Bhabha
(ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe and the Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference:
Potential and Pitfalls of (Non-) Western Approaches to History (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of
Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002); Sudipta Kaviraj, The Invention of Private Life: Literature
and Ideas (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).
(21.) As Partha Chatterjee reminded us, ‘Even if we dismiss the sociological view
that declares India to be a mere collection of discrete communities as a
peculiarly colonial construct, we are apparently still left with a brand of
postcolonial politics whose discursive forms are by no means free of that
construct’ (Nation and Its Fragments, p. 224). The present work is indebted to a
great extent to this particular insight of Chatterjee.
(22.) The most intriguing study of the utterly complex connects between the self
and the collective in colonial India, especially in its Muslim representations, is
Jalal, Self and Sovereignty.
(23.) In his classic study of the swadeshi movement, Sumit Sarkar showed how
to track the cultural traditions along with the political movements of a particular
time. However, one may now feel the need for a better understanding of the
range of cultural variations the Bengali nation had produced. See Sumit Sarkar,
Swadeshi Movement in Bengal. The first chapter of this book captures the
spectrum of these debates and dissents during the swadeshi period.
(24.) Jalal, ‘Preface’, Self and Sovereignty, p. xiv.
(25.) Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest, and Identity in Colonial India: The
Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–1947 (second edition, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011); Dwaipayan Sen, ‘“No Matter How, Jogendranath Had to Be
Defeated”: Scheduled Caste Federation and the Making of Partition in Bengal,
1945–47’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 49, no. 3 (2012): 321–64;
Anirban Bandyopadhyay, ‘Orchestrating a Signal Victory: Ambedkar, Mandal and
the 1946 Constituent Assembly Election’, in Invoking Ambedkar: Contributions,
Page 20 of 24
Introduction
Receptions, Legacies, edited by Biswamoy Pati (Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), pp.
33–58.
(26.) There were certain important disagreements on the visualization of nation

between the Bengali ideologues like Rabindranath Tagore and Abanindranath
Tagore, both belonging to the same family and same sociocultural traditions.
This is particularly significant as Rabindranath showed a distinct lack of
enthusiasm about the Bengal School of Art, a nationalist cultural project started
by his nephew Abanindranath. The divergence was not accidental but essentially
stemming from their different outlooks and priorities of nationalism. A recent
study on both these ideologues is Ananya Vajpeyi, Righteous Republic: The
Political Foundations of Modern India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2012).
(27.) In studying Bengal Muslim history, it is often forgotten that the Hindu
Bengali discourse did not display a linear trend of ‘otherization’ of the Bengali
Muslims, neither did it speak with one voice on the need of addressing the
problem of difference. Such a reverse homogenization of the Bengali Hindu
discourse may be found in R. Ahmed, The Bengali Muslims, 1871–1906; and
Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region, p. 26.
(28.) Sashibhushan Basu, ‘Bangala Nationality’, speech read in Rajshahi Sahitya

Sammilan and published in Prabasi 10, part 2, no. 2 (January 1911 [Agrahayan
1317 BS]), pp. 119–27; no. 3 (February 1911 [Poush 1317 BS]), pp. 326–36; no. 4
(March 1911 [Magh 1317 BS]), pp. 415–20.
(29.) Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Bhashar Katha’, Bangla Sabda-tattwa (1935; reprint,

Calcutta: Visva-Bharati, 1984), pp. 9–10. All citations refer to the 1984 edition.
(30.) Nareshchandra Sengupta, ‘Bhashar Akar o Bikar’, Sammilan 6, nos 5–6

(1916), p. 167.
(31.) Some of the recent contributions in this trend of regional history of nation
are: Neeti Nair, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and Partition of India
(Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011); Neilesh Bose, Recasting the Region; Prachi
Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India,
1700–1960 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007); and Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages
of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity and the Making of Kashmir (Delhi: Orient
Blackswan, 2003). However, while most of these studies focus on the
interrelations between region and the nation as such, this book, by claiming
region to be an altogether different dimension in conceiving the nation itself,
comes closer to another study by Swarupa Gupta, which discussed ‘Bengal’s
negotiation of the region and the nation in conceptualizations of nationhood’.
See Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal, Perspectives on Samaj,
1867–1905 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), p. 17.
Page 21 of 24
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
marry? For him it would be all very well, but what about her? Mrs.
Burgess, a good sort and no chatterbox, in whom he had confided,
thought this absence of his in England, ostensibly to see lawyers
might serve to make Daisy reconsider, think what it meant. It was a
question of her position, Mrs. Burgess said; the social barrier; giving
up her children. She’d be a widow with a past one of these days,
draggling about in the suburbs, or more likely, indiscriminate (you
know, she said, what such women get like, with too much paint). But
Peter Walsh pooh-poohed all that. He didn’t mean to die yet.
Anyhow she must settle for herself; judge for herself, he thought,
padding about the room in his socks smoothing out his dress-shirt,
for he might go to Clarissa’s party, or he might go to one of the Halls,
or he might settle in and read an absorbing book written by a man he
used to know at Oxford. And if he did retire, that’s what he’d do—
write books. He would go to Oxford and poke about in the Bodleian.
Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the terrace;
vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn’t care a straw what
people said. There he was, the man she thought the world of, the
perfect gentleman, the fascinating, the distinguished (and his age
made not the least difference to her), padding about a room in an
hotel in Bloomsbury, shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up
cans, put down razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the
truth about one or two little matters that interested him. And he would
have a chat with whoever it might be, and so come to disregard
more and more precise hours for lunch, and miss engagements, and
when Daisy asked him, as she would, for a kiss, a scene, fail to
come up to the scratch (though he was genuinely devoted to her)—
in short it might be happier, as Mrs. Burgess said, that she should
forget him, or merely remember him as he was in August 1922, like a
figure standing at the cross roads at dusk, which grows more and
more remote as the dog-cart spins away, carrying her securely
fastened to the back seat, though her arms are outstretched, and as
she sees the figure dwindle and disappear still she cries out how she
would do anything in the world, anything, anything, anything....
He never knew what people thought. It became more and more
difficult for him to concentrate. He became absorbed; he became
busied with his own concerns; now surly, now gay; dependent on
women, absent-minded, moody, less and less able (so he thought as
he shaved) to understand why Clarissa couldn’t simply find them a
lodging and be nice to Daisy; introduce her. And then he could just—
just do what? just haunt and hover (he was at the moment actually
engaged in sorting out various keys, papers), swoop and taste, be
alone, in short, sufficient to himself; and yet nobody of course was
more dependent upon others (he buttoned his waistcoat); it had
been his undoing. He could not keep out of smoking-rooms, liked
colonels, liked golf, liked bridge, and above all women’s society, and
the fineness of their companionship, and their faithfulness and
audacity and greatness in loving which though it had its drawbacks
seemed to him (and the dark, adorably pretty face was on top of the
envelopes) so wholly admirable, so splendid a flower to grow on the
crest of human life, and yet he could not come up to the scratch,
being always apt to see round things (Clarissa had sapped
something in him permanently), and to tire very easily of mute
devotion and to want variety in love, though it would make him
furious if Daisy loved anybody else, furious! for he was jealous,
uncontrollably jealous by temperament. He suffered tortures! But
where was his knife; his watch; his seals, his note-case, and
Clarissa’s letter which he would not read again but liked to think of,
and Daisy’s photograph? And now for dinner.
They were eating.
Sitting at little tables round vases, dressed or not dressed, with their
shawls and bags laid beside them, with their air of false composure,
for they were not used to so many courses at dinner, and
confidence, for they were able to pay for it, and strain, for they had
been running about London all day shopping, sightseeing; and their
natural curiosity, for they looked round and up as the nice-looking
gentleman in horn-rimmed spectacles came in, and their good
nature, for they would have been glad to do any little service, such
as lend a time-table or impart useful information, and their desire,
pulsing in them, tugging at them subterraneously, somehow to
establish connections if it were only a birthplace (Liverpool, for
example) in common or friends of the same name; with their furtive
glances, odd silences, and sudden withdrawals into family jocularity
and isolation; there they sat eating dinner when Mr. Walsh came in
and took his seat at a little table by the curtain.
It was not that he said anything, for being solitary he could only
address himself to the waiter; it was his way of looking at the menu,
of pointing his forefinger to a particular wine, of hitching himself up to
the table, of addressing himself seriously, not gluttonously to dinner,
that won him their respect; which, having to remain unexpressed for
the greater part of the meal, flared up at the table where the Morrises
sat when Mr. Walsh was heard to say at the end of the meal, “Bartlett
pears.” Why he should have spoken so moderately yet firmly, with
the air of a disciplinarian well within his rights which are founded
upon justice, neither young Charles Morris, nor old Charles, neither
Miss Elaine nor Mrs. Morris knew. But when he said, “Bartlett pears,”
sitting alone at his table, they felt that he counted on their support in
some lawful demand; was champion of a cause which immediately
became their own, so that their eyes met his eyes sympathetically,
and when they all reached the smoking-room simultaneously, a little
talk between them became inevitable.
It was not very profound—only to the effect that London was
crowded; had changed in thirty years; that Mr. Morris preferred
Liverpool; that Mrs. Morris had been to the Westminster flower-show,
and that they had all seen the Prince of Wales. Yet, thought Peter
Walsh, no family in the world can compare with the Morrises; none
whatever; and their relations to each other are perfect, and they
don’t care a hang for the upper classes, and they like what they like,
and Elaine is training for the family business, and the boy has won a
scholarship at Leeds, and the old lady (who is about his own age)
has three more children at home; and they have two motor cars, but
Mr. Morris still mends the boots on Sunday: it is superb, it is
absolutely superb, thought Peter Walsh, swaying a little backwards
and forwards with his liqueur glass in his hand among the hairy red
chairs and ash-trays, feeling very well pleased with himself, for the
Morrises liked him. Yes, they liked a man who said, “Bartlett pears.”
They liked him, he felt.
He would go to Clarissa’s party. (The Morrises moved off; but they
would meet again.) He would go to Clarissa’s party, because he
wanted to ask Richard what they were doing in India—the
conservative duffers. And what’s being acted? And music.... Oh yes,
and mere gossip.
For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like
inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way
between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on
and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to
the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a
positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping. What did
the Government mean—Richard Dalloway would know—to do about
India?
Since it was a very hot night and the paper boys went by with
placards proclaiming in huge red letters that there was a heat-wave,
wicker chairs were placed on the hotel steps and there, sipping,
smoking, detached gentlemen sat. Peter Walsh sat there. One might
fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman
who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself
in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze,
changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a
woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust,
heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting,
succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick
foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening
seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and
prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I
fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none
of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained
her to partnership in her revelry.
For the great revolution of Mr. Willett’s summer time had taken place
since Peter Walsh’s last visit to England. The prolonged evening was
new to him. It was inspiriting, rather. For as the young people went
by with their despatch-boxes, awfully glad to be free, proud too,
dumbly, of stepping this famous pavement, joy of a kind, cheap,
tinselly, if you like, but all the same rapture, flushed their faces. They
dressed well too; pink stockings; pretty shoes. They would now have
two hours at the pictures. It sharpened, it refined them, the yellow-
blue evening light; and on the leaves in the square shone lurid, livid
—they looked as if dipped in sea water—the foliage of a submerged
city. He was astonished by the beauty; it was encouraging too, for
where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of
them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world,
here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer
time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a
girl, from a housemaid’s laughter—intangible things you couldn’t lay
your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which
in his youth had seemed immovable. On top of them it had pressed;
weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers
Clarissa’s Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey
blotting-paper with Littré’s dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp
after dinner. She was dead now. He had heard of her, from Clarissa,
losing the sight of one eye. It seemed so fitting—one of nature’s
masterpieces—that old Miss Parry should turn to glass. She would
die like some bird in a frost gripping her perch. She belonged to a
different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand
up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking
some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this
interminable (he felt for a copper to buy a paper and read about
Surrey and Yorkshire—he had held out that copper millions of times.
Surrey was all out once more)—this interminable life. But cricket was
no mere game. Cricket was important. He could never help reading
about cricket. He read the scores in the stop press first, then how it
was a hot day; then about a murder case. Having done things
millions of times enriched them, though it might be said to take the
surface off. The past enriched, and experience, and having cared for
one or two people, and so having acquired the power which the
young lack, of cutting short, doing what one likes, not caring a rap
what people say and coming and going without any very great
expectations (he left his paper on the table and moved off), which
however (and he looked for his hat and coat) was not altogether true
of him, not to-night, for here he was starting to go to a party, at his
age, with the belief upon him that he was about to have an
experience. But what?
Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty
pure and simple—Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was
straightness and emptiness of course; the symmetry of a corridor;
but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a gramophone sounding; a
sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging
when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one
saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling,
conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a
strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on
top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite
richness, this life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and
swerved so quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing,
shrunk up under the shower of a tree; that was moving; so silent, so
absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of
some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious.
That was interesting. And so on into the flare and glare.
His light overcoat blew open, he stepped with indescribable
idiosyncrasy, leant a little forward, tripped, with his hands behind his
back and his eyes still a little hawklike; he tripped through London,
towards Westminster, observing.
Was everybody dining out, then? Doors were being opened here by
a footman to let issue a high-stepping old dame, in buckled shoes,
with three purple ostrich feathers in her hair. Doors were being
opened for ladies wrapped like mummies in shawls with bright
flowers on them, ladies with bare heads. And in respectable quarters
with stucco pillars through small front gardens lightly swathed with
combs in their hair (having run up to see the children), women came;
men waited for them, with their coats blowing open, and the motor
started. Everybody was going out. What with these doors being
opened, and the descent and the start, it seemed as if the whole of
London were embarking in little boats moored to the bank, tossing
on the waters, as if the whole place were floating off in carnival. And
Whitehall was skated over, silver beaten as it was, skated over by
spiders, and there was a sense of midges round the arc lamps; it
was so hot that people stood about talking. And here in Westminster
was a retired Judge, presumably, sitting four square at his house
door dressed all in white. An Anglo-Indian presumably.
And here a shindy of brawling women, drunken women; here only a
policeman and looming houses, high houses, domed houses,
churches, parliaments, and the hoot of a steamer on the river, a
hollow misty cry. But it was her street, this, Clarissa’s; cabs were
rushing round the corner, like water round the piers of a bridge,
drawn together, it seemed to him because they bore people going to
her party, Clarissa’s party.
The cold stream of visual impressions failed him now as if the eye
were a cup that overflowed and let the rest run down its china walls
unrecorded. The brain must wake now. The body must contract now,
entering the house, the lighted house, where the door stood open,
where the motor cars were standing, and bright women descending:
the soul must brave itself to endure. He opened the big blade of his
pocket-knife.
Lucy came running full tilt downstairs, having just nipped in to the
drawing-room to smooth a cover, to straighten a chair, to pause a
moment and feel whoever came in must think how clean, how bright,
how beautifully cared for, when they saw the beautiful silver, the
brass fire-irons, the new chair-covers, and the curtains of yellow
chintz: she appraised each; heard a roar of voices; people already
coming up from dinner; she must fly!
The Prime Minister was coming, Agnes said: so she had heard them
say in the dining-room, she said, coming in with a tray of glasses.
Did it matter, did it matter in the least, one Prime Minister more or
less? It made no difference at this hour of the night to Mrs. Walker
among the plates, saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in
aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared crusts of bread, lemons, soup
tureens, and pudding basins which, however hard they washed up in
the scullery seemed to be all on top of her, on the kitchen table, on
chairs, while the fire blared and roared, the electric lights glared, and
still supper had to be laid. All she felt was, one Prime Minister more
or less made not a scrap of difference to Mrs. Walker.
The ladies were going upstairs already, said Lucy; the ladies were
going up, one by one, Mrs. Dalloway walking last and almost always
sending back some message to the kitchen, “My love to Mrs.
Walker,” that was it one night. Next morning they would go over the
dishes—the soup, the salmon; the salmon, Mrs. Walker knew, as
usual underdone, for she always got nervous about the pudding and
left it to Jenny; so it happened, the salmon was always underdone.
But some lady with fair hair and silver ornaments had said, Lucy
said, about the entrée, was it really made at home? But it was the
salmon that bothered Mrs. Walker, as she spun the plates round and
round, and pulled in dampers and pulled out dampers; and there
came a burst of laughter from the dining-room; a voice speaking;
then another burst of laughter—the gentlemen enjoying themselves
when the ladies had gone. The tokay, said Lucy running in. Mr.
Dalloway had sent for the tokay, from the Emperor’s cellars, the
Imperial Tokay.
It was borne through the kitchen. Over her shoulder Lucy reported
how Miss Elizabeth looked quite lovely; she couldn’t take her eyes
off her; in her pink dress, wearing the necklace Mr. Dalloway had
given her. Jenny must remember the dog, Miss Elizabeth’s fox-
terrier, which, since it bit, had to be shut up and might, Elizabeth
thought, want something. Jenny must remember the dog. But Jenny
was not going upstairs with all those people about. There was a
motor at the door already! There was a ring at the bell—and the
gentlemen still in the dining-room, drinking tokay!
There, they were going upstairs; that was the first to come, and now
they would come faster and faster, so that Mrs. Parkinson (hired for
parties) would leave the hall door ajar, and the hall would be full of
gentlemen waiting (they stood waiting, sleeking down their hair)
while the ladies took their cloaks off in the room along the passage;
where Mrs. Barnet helped them, old Ellen Barnet, who had been with
the family for forty years, and came every summer to help the ladies,
and remembered mothers when they were girls, and though very
unassuming did shake hands; said “milady” very respectfully, yet had
a humorous way with her, looking at the young ladies, and ever so
tactfully helping Lady Lovejoy, who had some trouble with her
underbodice. And they could not help feeling, Lady Lovejoy and Miss
Alice, that some little privilege in the matter of brush and comb, was
awarded them having known Mrs. Barnet—“thirty years, milady,”
Mrs. Barnet supplied her. Young ladies did not use to rouge, said
Lady Lovejoy, when they stayed at Bourton in the old days. And Miss
Alice didn’t need rouge, said Mrs. Barnet, looking at her fondly.
There Mrs. Barnet would sit, in the cloakroom, patting down the furs,
smoothing out the Spanish shawls, tidying the dressing-table, and
knowing perfectly well, in spite of the furs and the embroideries,
which were nice ladies, which were not. The dear old body, said
Lady Lovejoy, mounting the stairs, Clarissa’s old nurse.
And then Lady Lovejoy stiffened. “Lady and Miss Lovejoy,” she said
to Mr. Wilkins (hired for parties). He had an admirable manner, as he
bent and straightened himself, bent and straightened himself and
announced with perfect impartiality “Lady and Miss Lovejoy ... Sir
John and Lady Needham ... Miss Weld ... Mr. Walsh.” His manner
was admirable; his family life must be irreproachable, except that it
seemed impossible that a being with greenish lips and shaven
cheeks could ever have blundered into the nuisance of children.
“How delightful to see you!” said Clarissa. She said it to every one.
How delightful to see you! She was at her worst—effusive, insincere.
It was a great mistake to have come. He should have stayed at
home and read his book, thought Peter Walsh; should have gone to
a music hall; he should have stayed at home, for he knew no one.
Oh dear, it was going to be a failure; a complete failure, Clarissa felt
it in her bones as dear old Lord Lexham stood there apologising for
his wife who had caught cold at the Buckingham Palace garden
party. She could see Peter out of the tail of her eye, criticising her,
there, in that corner. Why, after all, did she do these things? Why
seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her
anyhow! Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one’s
torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away like some Ellie
Henderson! It was extraordinary how Peter put her into these states
just by coming and standing in a corner. He made her see herself;
exaggerate. It was idiotic. But why did he come, then, merely to
criticise? Why always take, never give? Why not risk one’s one little
point of view? There he was wandering off, and she must speak to
him. But she would not get the chance. Life was that—humiliation,
renunciation. What Lord Lexham was saying was that his wife would
not wear her furs at the garden party because “my dear, you ladies
are all alike”—Lady Lexham being seventy-five at least! It was
delicious, how they petted each other, that old couple. She did like
old Lord Lexham. She did think it mattered, her party, and it made
her feel quite sick to know that it was all going wrong, all falling flat.
Anything, any explosion, any horror was better than people
wandering aimlessly, standing in a bunch at a corner like Ellie
Henderson, not even caring to hold themselves upright.
Gently the yellow curtain with all the birds of Paradise blew out and it
seemed as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out,
then sucked back. (For the windows were open.) Was it draughty,
Ellie Henderson wondered? She was subject to chills. But it did not
matter that she should come down sneezing to-morrow; it was the
girls with their naked shoulders she thought of, being trained to think
of others by an old father, an invalid, late vicar of Bourton, but he
was dead now; and her chills never went to her chest, never. It was
the girls she thought of, the young girls with their bare shoulders, she
herself having always been a wisp of a creature, with her thin hair
and meagre profile; though now, past fifty, there was beginning to
shine through some mild beam, something purified into distinction by
years of self-abnegation but obscured again, perpetually, by her
distressing gentility, her panic fear, which arose from three hundred
pounds’ income, and her weaponless state (she could not earn a
penny) and it made her timid, and more and more disqualified year
by year to meet well-dressed people who did this sort of thing every
night of the season, merely telling their maids “I’ll wear so and so,”
whereas Ellie Henderson ran out nervously and bought cheap pink
flowers, half a dozen, and then threw a shawl over her old black
dress. For her invitation to Clarissa’s party had come at the last
moment. She was not quite happy about it. She had a sort of feeling
that Clarissa had not meant to ask her this year.
Why should she? There was no reason really, except that they had
always known each other. Indeed, they were cousins. But naturally
they had rather drifted apart, Clarissa being so sought after. It was
an event to her, going to a party. It was quite a treat just to see the
lovely clothes. Wasn’t that Elizabeth, grown up, with her hair done in
the fashionable way, in the pink dress? Yet she could not be more
than seventeen. She was very, very handsome. But girls when they
first came out didn’t seem to wear white as they used. (She must
remember everything to tell Edith.) Girls wore straight frocks,
perfectly tight, with skirts well above the ankles. It was not becoming,
she thought.
So, with her weak eyesight, Ellie Henderson craned rather forward,
and it wasn’t so much she who minded not having any one to talk to
(she hardly knew anybody there), for she felt that they were all such
interesting people to watch; politicians presumably; Richard
Dalloway’s friends; but it was Richard himself who felt that he could
not let the poor creature go on standing there all the evening by
herself.
“Well, Ellie, and how’s the world treating you?” he said in his genial
way, and Ellie Henderson, getting nervous and flushing and feeling
that it was extraordinarily nice of him to come and talk to her, said
that many people really felt the heat more than the cold.
“Yes, they do,” said Richard Dalloway. “Yes.”
But what more did one say?
“Hullo, Richard,” said somebody, taking him by the elbow, and, good
Lord, there was old Peter, old Peter Walsh. He was delighted to see
him—ever so pleased to see him! He hadn’t changed a bit. And off
they went together walking right across the room, giving each other
little pats, as if they hadn’t met for a long time, Ellie Henderson
thought, watching them go, certain she knew that man’s face. A tall
man, middle aged, rather fine eyes, dark, wearing spectacles, with a
look of John Burrows. Edith would be sure to know.
The curtain with its flight of birds of Paradise blew out again. And
Clarissa saw—she saw Ralph Lyon beat it back, and go on talking.
So it wasn’t a failure after all! it was going to be all right now—her
party. It had begun. It had started. But it was still touch and go. She
must stand there for the present. People seemed to come in a rush.
Colonel and Mrs. Garrod ... Mr. Hugh Whitbread ... Mr. Bowley ...
Mrs. Hilbery ... Lady Mary Maddox ... Mr. Quin ... intoned Wilkin. She
had six or seven words with each, and they went on, they went into
the rooms; into something now, not nothing, since Ralph Lyon had
beat back the curtain.
And yet for her own part, it was too much of an effort. She was not
enjoying it. It was too much like being—just anybody, standing there;
anybody could do it; yet this anybody she did a little admire, couldn’t
help feeling that she had, anyhow, made this happen, that it marked
a stage, this post that she felt herself to have become, for oddly
enough she had quite forgotten what she looked like, but felt herself
a stake driven in at the top of her stairs. Every time she gave a party
she had this feeling of being something not herself, and that every
one was unreal in one way; much more real in another. It was, she
thought, partly their clothes, partly being taken out of their ordinary
ways, partly the background, it was possible to say things you
couldn’t say anyhow else, things that needed an effort; possible to
go much deeper. But not for her; not yet anyhow.
“How delightful to see you!” she said. Dear old Sir Harry! He would
know every one.
And what was so odd about it was the sense one had as they came
up the stairs one after another, Mrs. Mount and Celia, Herbert Ainsty,
Mrs. Dakers—oh and Lady Bruton!
“How awfully good of you to come!” she said, and she meant it—it
was odd how standing there one felt them going on, going on, some
quite old, some....
What name? Lady Rosseter? But who on earth was Lady Rosseter?
“Clarissa!” That voice! It was Sally Seton! Sally Seton! after all these
years! She loomed through a mist. For she hadn’t looked like that,
Sally Seton, when Clarissa grasped the hot water can, to think of her
under this roof, under this roof! Not like that!
All on top of each other, embarrassed, laughing, words tumbled out
—passing through London; heard from Clara Haydon; what a chance
of seeing you! So I thrust myself in—without an invitation....
One might put down the hot water can quite composedly. The lustre
had gone out of her. Yet it was extraordinary to see her again, older,
happier, less lovely. They kissed each other, first this cheek then
that, by the drawing-room door, and Clarissa turned, with Sally’s
hand in hers, and saw her rooms full, heard the roar of voices, saw
the candlesticks, the blowing curtains, and the roses which Richard
had given her.
“I have five enormous boys,” said Sally.
She had the simplest egotism, the most open desire to be thought
first always, and Clarissa loved her for being still like that. “I can’t
believe it!” she cried, kindling all over with pleasure at the thought of
the past.
But alas, Wilkins; Wilkins wanted her; Wilkins was emitting in a voice
of commanding authority as if the whole company must be
admonished and the hostess reclaimed from frivolity, one name:
“The Prime Minister,” said Peter Walsh.
The Prime Minister? Was it really? Ellie Henderson marvelled. What
a thing to tell Edith!
One couldn’t laugh at him. He looked so ordinary. You might have
stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits—poor chap, all
rigged up in gold lace. And to be fair, as he went his rounds, first with
Clarissa then with Richard escorting him, he did it very well. He tried
to look somebody. It was amusing to watch. Nobody looked at him.
They just went on talking, yet it was perfectly plain that they all knew,
felt to the marrow of their bones, this majesty passing; this symbol of
what they all stood for, English society. Old Lady Bruton, and she
looked very fine too, very stalwart in her lace, swam up, and they
withdrew into a little room which at once became spied upon,
guarded, and a sort of stir and rustle rippled through every one,
openly: the Prime Minister!
Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh,
standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and
doing homage! There! That must be, by Jove it was, Hugh
Whitbread, snuffing round the precincts of the great, grown rather
fatter, rather whiter, the admirable Hugh!
He looked always as if he were on duty, thought Peter, a privileged,
but secretive being, hoarding secrets which he would die to defend,
though it was only some little piece of tittle-tattle dropped by a court
footman, which would be in all the papers to-morrow. Such were his
rattles, his baubles, in playing with which he had grown white, come
to the verge of old age, enjoying the respect and affection of all who
had the privilege of knowing this type of the English public school
man. Inevitably one made up things like that about Hugh; that was
his style; the style of those admirable letters which Peter had read
thousands of miles across the sea in the Times, and had thanked
God he was out of that pernicious hubble-bubble if it were only to
hear baboons chatter and coolies beat their wives. An olive-skinned
youth from one of the Universities stood obsequiously by. Him he
would patronise, initiate, teach how to get on. For he liked nothing
better than doing kindnesses, making the hearts of old ladies
palpitate with the joy of being thought of in their age, their affliction,
thinking themselves quite forgotten, yet here was dear Hugh driving
up and spending an hour talking of the past, remembering trifles,
praising the home-made cake, though Hugh might eat cake with a
Duchess any day of his life, and, to look at him, probably did spend a
good deal of time in that agreeable occupation. The All-judging, the
All-merciful, might excuse. Peter Walsh had no mercy. Villains there
must be, and God knows the rascals who get hanged for battering
the brains of a girl out in a train do less harm on the whole than
Hugh Whitbread and his kindness. Look at him now, on tiptoe,
dancing forward, bowing and scraping, as the Prime Minister and
Lady Bruton emerged, intimating for all the world to see that he was
privileged to say something, something private, to Lady Bruton as
she passed. She stopped. She wagged her fine old head. She was
thanking him presumably for some piece of servility. She had her
toadies, minor officials in Government offices who ran about putting
through little jobs on her behalf, in return for which she gave them
luncheon. But she derived from the eighteenth century. She was all
right.
And now Clarissa escorted her Prime Minister down the room,
prancing, sparkling, with the stateliness of her grey hair. She wore
ear-rings, and a silver-green mermaid’s dress. Lolloping on the
waves and braiding her tresses she seemed, having that gift still; to
be; to exist; to sum it all up in the moment as she passed; turned,
caught her scarf in some other woman’s dress, unhitched it, laughed,
all with the most perfect ease and air of a creature floating in its
element. But age had brushed her; even as a mermaid might behold
in her glass the setting sun on some very clear evening over the
waves. There was a breath of tenderness; her severity, her prudery,
her woodenness were all warmed through now, and she had about
her as she said good-bye to the thick gold-laced man who was doing
his best, and good luck to him, to look important, an inexpressible
dignity; an exquisite cordiality; as if she wished the whole world well,
and must now, being on the very verge and rim of things, take her
leave. So she made him think. (But he was not in love.)
Indeed, Clarissa felt, the Prime Minister had been good to come.
And, walking down the room with him, with Sally there and Peter
there and Richard very pleased, with all those people rather inclined,
perhaps, to envy, she had felt that intoxication of the moment, that
dilatation of the nerves of the heart itself till it seemed to quiver,
steeped, upright;—yes, but after all it was what other people felt,
that; for, though she loved it and felt it tingle and sting, still these
semblances, these triumphs (dear old Peter, for example, thinking
her so brilliant), had a hollowness; at arm’s length they were, not in
the heart; and it might be that she was growing old but they satisfied
her no longer as they used; and suddenly, as she saw the Prime
Minister go down the stairs, the gilt rim of the Sir Joshua picture of
the little girl with a muff brought back Kilman with a rush; Kilman her
enemy. That was satisfying; that was real. Ah, how she hated her—
hot, hypocritical, corrupt; with all that power; Elizabeth’s seducer; the
woman who had crept in to steal and defile (Richard would say,
What nonsense!). She hated her: she loved her. It was enemies one
wanted, not friends—not Mrs. Durrant and Clara, Sir William and
Lady Bradshaw, Miss Truelock and Eleanor Gibson (whom she saw
coming upstairs). They must find her if they wanted her. She was for
the party!
There was her old friend Sir Harry.
“Dear Sir Harry!” she said, going up to the fine old fellow who had
produced more bad pictures than any other two Academicians in the
whole of St. John’s Wood (they were always of cattle, standing in
sunset pools absorbing moisture, or signifying, for he had a certain
range of gesture, by the raising of one foreleg and the toss of the
antlers, “the Approach of the Stranger”—all his activities, dining out,
racing, were founded on cattle standing absorbing moisture in sunset
pools).
“What are you laughing at?” she asked him. For Willie Titcomb and
Sir Harry and Herbert Ainsty were all laughing. But no. Sir Harry
could not tell Clarissa Dalloway (much though he liked her; of her
type he thought her perfect, and threatened to paint her) his stories
of the music hall stage. He chaffed her about her party. He missed
his brandy. These circles, he said, were above him. But he liked her;
respected her, in spite of her damnable, difficult upper-class
refinement, which made it impossible to ask Clarissa Dalloway to sit
on his knee. And up came that wandering will-o’-the-wisp, that
vagulous phosphorescence, old Mrs. Hilbery, stretching her hands to
the blaze of his laughter (about the Duke and the Lady), which, as
she heard it across the room, seemed to reassure her on a point
which sometimes bothered her if she woke early in the morning and
did not like to call her maid for a cup of tea; how it is certain we must
die.
“They won’t tell us their stories,” said Clarissa.
“Dear Clarissa!” exclaimed Mrs. Hilbery. She looked to-night, she
said, so like her mother as she first saw her walking in a garden in a
grey hat.
And really Clarissa’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother, walking in a
garden! But alas, she must go.
For there was Professor Brierly, who lectured on Milton, talking to
little Jim Hutton (who was unable even for a party like this to
compass both tie and waistcoat or make his hair lie flat), and even at
this distance they were quarrelling, she could see. For Professor
Brierly was a very queer fish. With all those degrees, honours,
lectureships between him and the scribblers he suspected instantly
an atmosphere not favourable to his queer compound; his prodigious
learning and timidity; his wintry charm without cordiality; his
innocence blent with snobbery; he quivered if made conscious by a
lady’s unkempt hair, a youth’s boots, of an underworld, very
creditable doubtless, of rebels, of ardent young people; of would-be
geniuses, and intimated with a little toss of the head, with a sniff—
Humph!—the value of moderation; of some slight training in the
classics in order to appreciate Milton. Professor Brierly (Clarissa
could see) wasn’t hitting it off with little Jim Hutton (who wore red
socks, his black being at the laundry) about Milton. She interrupted.
She said she loved Bach. So did Hutton. That was the bond between
them, and Hutton (a very bad poet) always felt that Mrs. Dalloway
was far the best of the great ladies who took an interest in art. It was
odd how strict she was. About music she was purely impersonal.
She was rather a prig. But how charming to look at! She made her
house so nice if it weren’t for her Professors. Clarissa had half a
mind to snatch him off and set him down at the piano in the back
room. For he played divinely.
“But the noise!” she said. “The noise!”
“The sign of a successful party.” Nodding urbanely, the Professor
stepped delicately off.
“He knows everything in the whole world about Milton,” said Clarissa.
“Does he indeed?” said Hutton, who would imitate the Professor
throughout Hampstead; the Professor on Milton; the Professor on
moderation; the Professor stepping delicately off.
But she must speak to that couple, said Clarissa, Lord Gayton and
Nancy Blow.
Not that they added perceptibly to the noise of the party. They were
not talking (perceptibly) as they stood side by side by the yellow
curtains. They would soon be off elsewhere, together; and never had
very much to say in any circumstances. They looked; that was all.
That was enough. They looked so clean, so sound, she with an
apricot bloom of powder and paint, but he scrubbed, rinsed, with the
eyes of a bird, so that no ball could pass him or stroke surprise him.
He struck, he leapt, accurately, on the spot. Ponies’ mouths quivered
at the end of his reins. He had his honours, ancestral monuments,
banners hanging in the church at home. He had his duties; his
tenants; a mother and sisters; had been all day at Lords, and that
was what they were talking about—cricket, cousins, the movies—
when Mrs. Dalloway came up. Lord Gayton liked her most awfully.
So did Miss Blow. She had such charming manners.
“It is angelic—it is delicious of you to have come!” she said. She
loved Lords; she loved youth, and Nancy, dressed at enormous
expense by the greatest artists in Paris, stood there looking as if her
body had merely put forth, of its own accord, a green frill.
“I had meant to have dancing,” said Clarissa.
For the young people could not talk. And why should they? Shout,
embrace, swing, be up at dawn; carry sugar to ponies; kiss and
caress the snouts of adorable chows; and then all tingling and
streaming, plunge and swim. But the enormous resources of the
English language, the power it bestows, after all, of communicating
feelings (at their age, she and Peter would have been arguing all the
evening), was not for them. They would solidify young. They would
be good beyond measure to the people on the estate, but alone,
perhaps, rather dull.
“What a pity!” she said. “I had hoped to have dancing.”
It was so extraordinarily nice of them to have come! But talk of
dancing! The rooms were packed.
There was old Aunt Helena in her shawl. Alas, she must leave them
—Lord Gayton and Nancy Blow. There was old Miss Parry, her aunt.
For Miss Helena Parry was not dead: Miss Parry was alive. She was
past eighty. She ascended staircases slowly with a stick. She was
placed in a chair (Richard had seen to it). People who had known
Burma in the ’seventies were always led up to her. Where had Peter
got to? They used to be such friends. For at the mention of India, or
even Ceylon, her eyes (only one was glass) slowly deepened,
became blue, beheld, not human beings—she had no tender
memories, no proud illusions about Viceroys, Generals, Mutinies—it
was orchids she saw, and mountain passes and herself carried on
the backs of coolies in the ’sixties over solitary peaks; or descending
to uproot orchids (startling blossoms, never beheld before) which
she painted in water-colour; an indomitable Englishwoman, fretful if
disturbed by the War, say, which dropped a bomb at her very door,
from her deep meditation over orchids and her own figure journeying
in the ’sixties in India—but here was Peter.
“Come and talk to Aunt Helena about Burma,” said Clarissa.
And yet he had not had a word with her all the evening!
“We will talk later,” said Clarissa, leading him up to Aunt Helena, in
her white shawl, with her stick.
“Peter Walsh,” said Clarissa.
That meant nothing.
Clarissa had asked her. It was tiring; it was noisy; but Clarissa had
asked her. So she had come. It was a pity that they lived in London
—Richard and Clarissa. If only for Clarissa’s health it would have
been better to live in the country. But Clarissa had always been fond
of society.
“He has been in Burma,” said Clarissa.
Ah. She could not resist recalling what Charles Darwin had said
about her little book on the orchids of Burma.
(Clarissa must speak to Lady Bruton.)
No doubt it was forgotten now, her book on the orchids of Burma, but
it went into three editions before 1870, she told Peter. She
remembered him now. He had been at Bourton (and he had left her,
Peter Walsh remembered, without a word in the drawing-room that
night when Clarissa had asked him to come boating).
“Richard so much enjoyed his lunch party,” said Clarissa to Lady
Bruton.
“Richard was the greatest possible help,” Lady Bruton replied. “He
helped me to write a letter. And how are you?”
“Oh, perfectly well!” said Clarissa. (Lady Bruton detested illness in
the wives of politicians.)
“And there’s Peter Walsh!” said Lady Bruton (for she could never
think of anything to say to Clarissa; though she liked her. She had
lots of fine qualities; but they had nothing in common—she and
Clarissa. It might have been better if Richard had married a woman
with less charm, who would have helped him more in his work. He
had lost his chance of the Cabinet). “There’s Peter Walsh!” she said,
shaking hands with that agreeable sinner, that very able fellow who
should have made a name for himself but hadn’t (always in
difficulties with women), and, of course, old Miss Parry. Wonderful
old lady!
Lady Bruton stood by Miss Parry’s chair, a spectral grenadier,
draped in black, inviting Peter Walsh to lunch; cordial; but without
small talk, remembering nothing whatever about the flora or fauna of
India. She had been there, of course; had stayed with three
Viceroys; thought some of the Indian civilians uncommonly fine
fellows; but what a tragedy it was—the state of India! The Prime
Minister had just been telling her (old Miss Parry huddled up in her
shawl, did not care what the Prime Minister had just been telling
her), and Lady Bruton would like to have Peter Walsh’s opinion, he
being fresh from the centre, and she would get Sir Sampson to meet
him, for really it prevented her from sleeping at night, the folly of it,
the wickedness she might say, being a soldier’s daughter. She was
an old woman now, not good for much. But her house, her servants,
her good friend Milly Brush—did he remember her?—were all there
only asking to be used if—if they could be of help, in short. For she
never spoke of England, but this isle of men, this dear, dear land,
was in her blood (without reading Shakespeare), and if ever a

PDF Different Nationalisms Bengal 1905 1947 Semanti Ghosh Ebook Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

PDF Different Nationalisms Bengal 1905 1947 Semanti Ghosh Ebook Full Chapter

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Different Nationalisms: Bengal,

1905–1947 Semanti Ghosh

Laterites of the Bengal Basin: Characterization,

Biota Grow 2C gather 2C cook Loucas

The Rise and Fall of Russia s Far Eastern Republic 1905

Climate Change Adaptation and Forest Dependent

Gun Island Ghosh Amitav

The Russian Revolution, 1905-1921 1st Edition Mark D.

Cypriot Nationalisms in Context: History, Identity and

Mathematics and Computing Debdas Ghosh

Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947

Print publication date: 2016

(p.i) Different Nationalisms (p.ii)

(p.iii) Different Nationalisms

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

© Oxford University Press 2017

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

First Edition published in 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 10.5/12.5

Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947

Print publication date: 2016

Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947

Print publication date: 2016

Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947

Print publication date: 2016

at the British Library); in New Delhi, at the National Archives of India; in

Different Nationalisms: Bengal, 1905-1947

Print publication date: 2016

Abstract and Keywords

nationalisms, based on ‘other identities’, or ‘other kinds’ of ideological

(p.2) Although nationalism has been an over-explored problematic in the

By questioning the singularity of nationalism, my book also aims to address a

ideology, and dismiss them as antithetical to nationalism, is now a well-heard

It is, therefore, counterproductive to envisage communal ideology as the

Even the less conventional explanations of colonial nationalism, offered, for

Difference, Representation, and the Criticality of the Region

A number of constitutive dilemmas for the colonial modern subject surfaces

Once the claims of difference emerge, an urge for representation follows

(p.10) around themes of identity too reached an unprecedented height and

It being so, an exploration of the problematic of difference can never be strictly

Thus, the responses of Hindu-nationalist thinkers to the question of difference

twentieth-century Bengal very often turned the focus on regional expressions

Nevertheless, these dissensions made the region–nation full of potentials, but

The ‘Climax’ of Partition?

Since these trends of regional accommodation finally gave in to the demands of

Structuring the Narratives

The second chapter explores the debates on constitutional representation, the

The over-deterministic historicity of the Partition of 1947 and the ‘inevitability

This book is the culmination of my doctoral dissertation (‘Nationalism and the

challenges against the concept of nation in Bengal, and finally, to understand

(3.) Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism’, p. 102.

(4.) In this context, however, it is important to remember that there is a

(6.) Jalal, ‘Exploding Communalism’, and Self and Sovereignty.

(8.) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and

(9.) P. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, p. 6.

(11.) P. Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, p. 238.

(12.) Chatterjee’s ‘fragments’ in this respect reminds us of Guha’s famous

(14.) It is indeed important to step beyond the cognitive monolith of the

(15.) Muslim Hitaishi, December 29, Report on Native Papers in Bengal

(16.) Sugata Bose, ‘Between Monolith and Fragment’, p. 288.