Hist Workshop J 2007 Chattopadhyay 212 39

Aut

hor'

s ph

otog

raph

Fig. 2. College Street area, Calcutta. In the background is the Baptist Mission and Meeting Hall.

Aut

hor'

s ph

otog

raph

Fig. 1. The People’s Corner Bookshop, College Street, Calcutta.

at Jawaharlal N

ehru University on N

ovember 13, 2013

http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/

Dow

nloaded from



ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

War, Migration and Alienation inColonial Calcutta: the Remaking of

Muzaffar Ahmadby Suchetana Chattopadhyay

INTRODUCTION

Muzaffar Ahmad (1889–1973) came to Calcutta in 1913. His ambition wasto be a writer. When the First World War ended, he was rethinking hisdecision to be solely a cultural activist. By 1922, his political activism had ledhim towards a Marxist perspective of society and he had emerged as thecentral figure of the first socialist nucleus in the city. He was later to becomeone of the most prominent Communists in the Indian city where theCommunist movement has proved most resilient. This article examinesthe war years and argues they were crucial in socially ‘reshuffling’the ingredients that went into the making of a changed political

Aut

hor'

s ph

otog

raph

Fig. 3. Street scene near College Street, Calcutta.

History Workshop Journal Issue 64 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm036

� The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



consciousness. It examines Muzaffar Ahmad’s urban social milieu and thepolitical trends evident among the Calcutta intelligentsia during the 1910s,and the ways in which they shaped the process of ideological transition.1

The journeys from the rural to the urban have frequently been viewedthrough the prism of ‘migration’. Autobiographical writings, fiction andhistorical narratives are replete with experiences of collective and individualchanges. This article, however, focuses not on the process of migrationfrom the countryside but on the sources of self-transformation in the city.Taking the early urban experiences of an impoverished lower middle-classMuslim intellectual from Eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh) as a frame,it investigates the continuously shifting registers of alienation and margin-alization as experienced by a migrant-outsider, and their interplay withforces of opposition and resistance in a colonial city during the First WorldWar. A wider context shaped the political tendencies visible in wartimeCalcutta: the extraordinary drain of resources by the colonizers in the formof money, men and material which directly contributed to a sharpdeterioration in the living conditions of ordinary people; the conditionalsupport extended to the colonizers by the mainstream nationalist leaders inthe hope of major concessions after the war; the determination of differentrevolutionary groups to weaken and overthrow the temporarily beleagueredimperial order; and British anxiety to maintain control over thesubcontinent through heightened repression. The article demonstrates theimpact of these strategies on the urban milieu in which Muzaffar Ahmadfound himself and which contributed to his transition.

STREETS UNKNOWN

Why did he come to the city? In 1913, Muzaffar Ahmad was just onemore in the sea of poor lower middle-class migrants. They crowded theurban space that was Calcutta, in search of a better life which often provedto be elusive. As his existence became intertwined with the city, Muzaffargradually ceased to display strong attachment to his rural origins. Despiteperiodic absence, the city was to become the setting of his social and politicalactivities. He remained in touch with the rural milieu he had left behind,yet it was no longer his world. Muzaffar’s immediate rural environmenthad propelled him towards the city. In the vortex of metropolitan upheavals,his life would take a completely different turn. A new political focus,previously absent, was going to emerge.

For those born in genteel poverty in the rural areas of Bengal in the1880s, the city represented a gateway to material opportunities andsocial advancement. From the second half of the nineteenth century, themiddle and lower strata of landed proprietors in the Bengal countrysidewere increasingly unable to sustain themselves from agrarian income.The impending loss of class and property could only be prevented bybranching out to civil professions. Western education, and particularly some

214 History Workshop Journal

at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



knowledge of English, was the bridge that had to be crossed to make one’sway in a colonized society.2 The material constraints in Sandwip, a remoteisland in the Bay of Bengal, a part of the Noakhali district in Eastern Bengalat the time, compelled Muzaffar to migrate to Calcutta.3

The familiar, unlit, relatively less crowded villages and district townssuddenly gave way to an alien, luminous, overpopulated, and denselyconstructed urban social space. This sharp change in the physical form ofthe material location could be bewildering, visually arresting and unsettling.Civic infrastructures gave Calcutta its distinct metropolitan features.By 1913, it had regained its status as the capital of reunified Bengal, buthad lost its role as the administrative centre of British India. As if tocompensate for the fall from its highly ambiguous pre-eminence as thecentre of colonial rule, massive projects were undertaken to spruce up itsimage as the leading centre of colonial capital. Even this position was to betaken away after the First World War.4 But in the pre-war and inter-waryears, Calcutta was still a showpiece of colonial urban development.

The pride and high hopes of the colonial municipal planners in 1912–13in the ‘capital of the newly created Presidency of Bengal’ found reflection inthe following pronouncement:

Its trade, commerce, industries and its civic amenities have all developedduring the year and there seems no reason for doubting that its prosperitywill continue or for apprehending that it may forfeit its claim to be thefirst city in India.

Among the civic facilities expanded in the course of 1912–13, the reportfocused on the lighting system of the city. Proudly announced was the‘illuminating power’ of the 443 new gaslights, bringing the total number ofstreet-lamps fuelled by gas to 10,502. The proposal to install electric lights‘in certain selected streets’ was also considered.5

City lights beckoned though their dazzle could not hide the contra-dictions of urban existence. Uncertainty immediately engulfed the impov-erished migrant upon arrival. ‘The transfer of the capital’ from Calcutta toDelhi in 1912 meant the loss of ‘major sources of government jobs andpatronage’.6 The racial hierarchy of a colonized city produced its ownparadoxes. The groups and classes populating the city were concentrated indifferent geographic zones. Neighbourhoods to the north and the east of thecity constituted the ‘native’ quarters. This area of ‘intense density’, a maze ofnarrow alleys and main roads, housed the principal Indian-owned markets,shops and business centres. The city-centre and areas to the south and westwere well-planned with wide roads. European-owned banks, governmentand public offices, leading hotels and the spacious residences of business andadministrative personnel were located in these zones. While the denselypopulated north was overwhelmingly Indian in composition, the ‘sparselyinhabited’ south was predominantly ‘European in character’.7 Claims by

War, Migration and Alienation in Colonial Calcutta 215

at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



civic authorities of developing the infrastructure were underwritten byhidden disparities in resource allocation. The lighting system, occupyingsuch a pride of place in the Municipal Report of 1912–13, demonstrateda spatial hierarchy shaped directly by the priorities of colonial capital.In the northern wards, the Indian population complained that gaslightsinstalled there could not be relied upon. On the other hand, Store Roadin Ballygunge, a fashionable European neighbourhood in south Calcutta,was the area selected for the introduction of electricity supply, and wasequipped with free electric lights for three months as part of an‘experimental demonstration’.8

The civic infrastructure was also not adequate to deal with a substantialand escalating death rate from epidemics. Plague, dengue, malaria,smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis and respiratory diseases claimedtheir share of victims. However, the authorities did try to introducebetter funeral arrangements that year. The dead were classified and care wastaken to dispose of their bodies according to religion. Various alterationsand improvements of the cremation and burial grounds were made. Ironrailings replaced the old boundary wall of Gori Goriban cemetery inPark Circus, and a small piece of low-lying land within it was raised andmade available for fresh graves.9 This was the cemetery where MuzaffarAhmad was buried sixty years later.

The city also came to be associated with images of impending socialcatastrophe. Newspaper reports spoke of rise in traffic accidents from‘an enormous increase in the number of motor cars’. Other dangers lurkedon the street corners. On the eve of the First World War and during the earlyyears of the war, assaults on pedestrians by drunken European soldiersand robberies by organized gangs were reported in Indian newspapers.In 1914, a confrontation between college students and European soldiers ina railway station led to demands for a government investigation.10

The Bengal intelligentsia was increasingly caught up in the economic andpolitical issues which came to the forefront with the outbreak of war. As thecolony was drawn more and more into an imperialist war-effort, gloomyforecasts of a regional famine were made amid spiralling food prices andunemployment. The mainstream nationalist leadership extended its supportto the imperial war-effort in the hope of future political reforms. No attemptwas made to channel wartime popular grievances against the hardshipsimposed by colonialism into an anti-colonial mass movement. As conditionskept deteriorating, issues related to the poor received increased attentionfrom sections of the intelligentsia. Attitudes towards the poor ranged from aliberal-humanist, paternalist and genuinely felt ‘compassionate protection-ist’ concern to impulses of undisguised terror and loathing. A palpableanxiety centring on proprietorial control over society was evident. Alarmedmiddle-class voices, fearful that sections of the criminalized urban poor wereabout to take over the streets, demanded greater police protection. At thesame time, the colonial state was not seen as sufficiently reliable to uphold


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



justice. An extension of police powers to suppress openly rebelliousmembers of the intelligentsia drew condemnation. There was outrage overracist attacks, including fatal beatings inflicted on domestic servants andworkmen by European officials, officially treated as ‘accidental’ deaths from‘ruptured spleen’. Anti-colonial sentiments were also expressed on what wasseen as the arbitrary detention of nationalist revolutionaries from a HinduBengali middle-class background and of pan-Islamic preachers under thewartime security acts. Outside Nakhoda Mosque, the most importantmonument to Islamic worship in Calcutta, the police picked up MaulaviImamuddin, a pan-Islamist described as a ‘warrior’ of faith, in late 1916.The Muslim press claimed that he ‘had no political interests whatsoever’ andhis indefinite internment would ‘produce a baneful influence on the publicmind’. During the war years, the British surveillance network was accused ofmanufacturing suspects to justify the repression of political dissent, brandedas ‘extremism’, ‘sedition’ and ‘terror’. Press censorship, a strategy to preventanti-colonial opinions from spreading, also attracted strong criticism.11

These extraordinary wartime social and political anxieties were to merge andpave the way for greater, though temporary, post-war solidarity among themiddle and upper-classes of Indian society despite the community identitiesthat had emerged under colonial rule in Bengal. The complex relationshipbetween social hierarchy and sectional configurations, phenomena madeacute by the colonial circumstance, shaped the multi-layered political cultureof Calcutta. Popular politics reflected the volatile interconnections betweennationalism, working-class unrest, and communal hostilities.

THE FLAME AND THE FLAG OF ISLAM

The social stimulus behind popularization of political Islam in such anenvironment stemmed from the interconnections of official policy, especiallythe politics of colonial census, the complexities of mainstream nationalismwhich freely borrowed ideological symbols of Hindu revivalist politics, andcompetition with different ranks of the Hindu community over the restrictedresources available to Indians in a colonial milieu. During the second decadeof the last century, Muslim identity-politics displayed contradictory socialdirections. The ideological fluidity accommodated sentiments both anti-imperialist and sectional in character. However, during and immediatelyafter the war, the sectional components of identity-thinking were largelysuperseded by widespread grievance against colonial rule. The resurgence ofpan-Islamist politics in the second decade was directly linked with increasedwestern incursions into Turkish territory. It influenced rising anti-colonialfeelings among Muslim populations of the colonial world. The change inand struggle over the leadership of the ‘community’ reflected this politicalshift in the years immediately preceding the war.

The reunification of Bengal as an administrative unit in 1912 had meantwithdrawal of social power and privileges which the Muslim proprietor


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



classes had temporarily come to experience in East Bengal from 1905. Thisled to acute political resentment not only towards the colonial governmentbut also towards the loyalist, mostly Urdu-speaking aristocratic leaders.The capture of the leadership of the All-India Muslim League in 1912 bypan-Islamist and anti-loyalist forces, along with the Lucknow Pact of 1916between the Muslim League and the Congress (to share seats in the electedbodies and exert pressure on the government to cede greater power toIndians after the war), contributed to the popularity of militant anti-government politics among large sections of the city Muslims. A. K. FazlulHaq and Abul Kalam Azad, new leaders respectively representing theBengali and Urdu-speaking intelligentsia, were closely aligned withthese developments. The different shades of Islamist politics theyrepresented ranged from opposition to the government, as in the case ofHaq, to militant anti-colonial resistance, as evident in Azad’s actions.Extensive joint campaigns for civil liberties were generated during the warby arrests of Indian revolutionaries, mainly from a Bengali Hindu middle-class background, and of pan-Islamists who opposed and tried to subvertBritish war-efforts. After the war, the Khilafat and Non-Co-operationmovements became the vehicles of this unity.12 For a small thoughsignificant minority, participation in and support for these anti-colonialmass movements involved rejection of the political authority and ideology ofpan-Islamist and nationalist leaders. From an anti-authoritarian commu-nitarianism they would move on to communism. ‘Reshuffled’ in the courseof the war and reconfigured during the postwar anti-colonial mass upsurge,their politics underwent a transformation.

IN AND AROUND COLLEGE STREET

Anti-colonial political Islam dominated the world of the urban Muslimintelligentsia when Muzaffar arrived in the city. His social milieu in Calcuttabetween 1913 and 1919 was initially the student community. He alsodeveloped close and deepening links with wider, mainly Muslim, middle-class intellectual circles. These literary associations, rather than the studentcommunity, were to become the focus of his social existence in the city.

Though Muzaffar’s student life in the city was relatively brief, he becamefamiliar with a mode of social existence and politics associated with theyoung intelligentsia. Students displayed vigorous political interests. From1905, students from a Hindu middle-class background became visible innationalist politics. The process was followed by increased recruitment ofBengali Hindu middle-class youth, especially students, into the nationalistrevolutionary networks, directing acts of individual terror against Europeanadministrators and their Indian collaborators.13 Muzaffar was acquaintedwith this form of politics. One of his most prominent classmates inthe Noakhali District School had been initiated into revolutionarynationalism and served time in prison.14 A climate of admiration and


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



sufficient support among students allowed the nationalist revolutionaries tofunction. The student community sheltered them and supplied new recruits.Neighbourhoods in and around College Street, a central thoroughfareof north Calcutta, provided the physical spaces where different forms ofanti-colonial dissent emerged and were sustained. Student lodgings, collegeresidences, top colonial educational institutions for Indians such asPresidency College and Calcutta University, various institutions linkedwith the public activities of the intelligentsia, as well as College Square, aswimming pool and park could all be used to host meetings and discussions.

With this concentration of the literati the locality was also a flourishingcentre of the book trade. As well as the offices of most of Calcutta’sbooksellers and publishers, including the journals Muzaffar Ahmad cameto be associated with, it also housed the second-hand book-market.While the established booksellers and publishers mainly came from aBengali Hindu middle and upper-class background, impoverished Muslimsmonopolized the used book-trade. They would spread their wares on jutecloths and sacks on the pavements of College Street, where middle-classclients came and browsed through page after page for hours. These tradersand the bookbinders, a profession also dominated by Muslims, created adaily social link between the urban working-class and the Calcuttaintelligentsia.15 The burgeoning underworld, consisting of hoodlumsand pickpockets with a large proportion of unemployed Muslim working-class people who had turned to crime, also enjoyed a presence in this area.16

Though volatile and prone to riot in times of acute hardship, this segmentwas also responsive to the widespread anti-state upsurge which becameevident in the post-war period.

Students flocked to the city from the countryside to study at theCalcutta colleges. Among these, a sizeable section came from East Bengal.Muzaffar was part of this inflow. As aliens in a metropolitan milieu,students from outside Calcutta drew sustenance from district, communal,ethnic, linguistic, caste and provincial affiliations. Lodgings often broughttogether students and non-students who shared one of these identities.It gave them the security of a collective existence in an otherwise unfamiliarenvironment. The maze of alleys, by-lanes and streets connectingCollege Street with the surrounding areas of the North were the heart ofmess-life in Calcutta. This was the world of the lone male who had leftbehind his family unit when he arrived in the metropolis in search ofeducation and jobs.

Wealth and social status divided the mess communities. Lower middle-class students rented the stairwell of a rooming house as a place to sleep atnight. Religious distinctions and their minority status within the studentcommunity often made it difficult for Muslim students from the Bengalcountryside or from other provinces to find suitable living space. Theshortage of accommodation sometimes forced Muslim students to give uptheir studies in Calcutta and return home. In 1912, the year before Muzaffar


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



came to the city, the plight of Muslim students refused admission toCalcutta colleges and hostels generated controversy. The lack of housingwas highlighted in particular. Hindu landlords and mess-keepers oftenrefused to let out their premises – part of a wider and persistent socialproblem reflecting the communal prejudices of Hindu property-owners.Some less prejudiced and economically pragmatic Bengali Hindu landlords,however, were willing to rent out their property to Muslims. In 1918,the Bengal Muslim Literary Society, an association to which MuzaffarAhmad belonged, was able to rent a portion of a house owned by a BengaliHindu medical practitioner.17 A significant number of students earnedboard and lodging as private tutors, staying with the middle-class Muslimfamilies who employed them. Muzaffar stayed with one family for fouryears during the war, in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood close toCollege Street.18

This then was Muzaffar Ahmad’s material environment when he arrivedin Calcutta and enrolled at Bangabashi College for a pre-graduation course.Bangabashi was part of a cluster of colleges affiliated to Calcutta University,set up at the initiative of the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia to provide greatereducational opportunities to the increasing numbers of Bengali middle-classstudents. These were self-supporting institutions, dependent on tuition fees.Bangabashi was one of the largest, and unlike some other institutions itadmitted Muslim students. Muslim lower middle-class students wereattracted to institutions like these because of their low fees. However,Muslims formed a tiny minority within the student body. Among more thana thousand students enrolled in 1914, only twenty-seven were Muslims.19

Muzaffar was one of them.Muzaffar failed to qualify in the pre-graduation examination and gave up

his studies. Among Muslim and indigent students, this was not unusual.The proportion of successful Muslim students was low and povertyprevented the unsuccessful ones from continuing. Though Muzaffar was astudent only for two years in Calcutta, College Street and its surroundingneighbourhoods remained his regular haunt. During 1919–1920, he residedat the literary society office at College Street. He was a habitue of theBook Company. This shop opened in College Square in 1917, and quicklyout-manoeuvred older, established European-owned book firms likeThacker-Spinck to become the largest importer of foreign books, includingbanned literature. The owner, Girindranath Mitra, was always welcomingeven though the shop had begun to attract police attention for its stock ofpotentially seditious literature and its association with early communistslike Muzaffar and with nationalist revolutionaries. Some of theserevolutionaries even secured employment there. The shop was also wellknown as a meeting-place of Bengali writers and intellectuals from diversesocial backgrounds and literary circles.20

The bookshops, the mess-system, the cheap restaurants, the tea-stalls andthe all-pervasive mess-life continued to provide the realms of social


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



interactions for Muzaffar, constituting the public sphere where hecirculated. In an age of greater Hindu-Muslim co-operation and widespreadMuslim antipathy towards the British government, he felt drawn towardsthe joint anti-colonial struggle. The Indian National Congress had extendedits support to the government with the onset of war. The nationalistrevolutionaries comprised the only branch of the nationalist movement notto have done so. They were trying to subvert the war-effort and therebyweaken colonial rule in India. Muzaffar’s location made him quite close totheir field of recruitment. Besides, their individual courage in the face ofpolice torture and state repression made them contemporary middle-classyouth icons. But inspired by Hindu revivalist ideology, they often refused toinclude Muslims. Members of the Anushilan Samiti were openly antagonisticto Muslims. The Jugantar group was less so but, like Anushilan, wassaturated with Hindu imagery of nationhood.21 Muzaffar later wrote of hismix of attraction and antipathy to these groups:

Considering my mental condition in the second decade of this centuryand the romance that lay in the terrorist movement, it was not impossiblefor me to join the terrorist revolutionary camp, but therewere . . . obstacles . . .The terrorist revolutionaries drew their inspirationfrom Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath. This book wasfilled with [Hindu] communal ill-will . . .The fundamental message of thebook lay in Bankimchandra’s invocation Vande-Mataram. The songcontains the lines:

Thou, as strength in arms of menThou, as faith, in hearts, dost reign,. . .For, thou hast ten-armed Durga’s power . . .

How could a monotheist Muslim youth utter this invocation?22

In nationalist political culture, the country was synonymous with a mother-goddess. Since idolatrous and Hindu chauvinist symbols dominated allbranches of nationalism, they excluded Muzaffar and other Muslims.Muzaffar was unable to commit himself totally to this form of anti-colonialpolitics. However, wider anti-imperialist forums and mobilizations con-tinued to attract him.23

Instead of direct political engagement, Muzaffar gradually turned to full-time cultural activism. While he was a student, like most lone migrants in analien environment, Muzaffar had looked for some kind of an associationwhich would provide a sense of collectivity. He was already a publishedauthor and soon turned to literary circles. At the initiative of a group ofstudents like himself, an association had been set up in 1911: the BengalMuslim Literary Society (Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Samiti) devoted tothe popularization and strengthening of Bengali literature amongBengali Muslims.24 Shunned by the ideological and social prejudices of


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



Hindu upper and middle-class society, the tiny Muslim intelligentsia inCalcutta formed community-based associations of their own. Suchassociations indicated a desire for religious consolidation along exclusivistlines. Similar organizations also developed among Muslim workers. Thedialectic behind the formation of these and other organizations for migrants,minorities and the marginalized represented a complex mosaic of identityand difference rooted in the social matrix of the city. Out of the contractionand expansion of various types of communities and networks, intersectingcollectivities were being continuously constituted, reconstituted anddissolved. The social need propelling Muzaffar towards the BengalMuslim Literary Society also made him associate with other non-exclusivisttranscommunal associations. These continuous circulations betweenlarger and smaller social spaces indicated the contradictions and con-vergences relating to Gemeinschaft (community of shared values) andGesellschaft (civil society) in the city.25

The emergence of the Bengal Muslim Literary Society also signalled anawareness of being a minority within a minority, producing the need toseparate from Urdu-dominated literary culture. A mess run by a group ofMuslim students living at Choku Khansama Lane in the north acted as itsoffice. The society office later moved to 32 College Street. Muzaffar startedliving at this address in 1919, as the society became the focus of his culturalactivities.26 Though the Bengal Muslim Literary Society aimed to workwithin the Bengali Muslim literate community, it developed a pluralcharacter. The organization offered membership to Bengali Hinduintellectuals interested in promoting the Bengali language among Muslimsin a province where majority of Bengali-speakers were classified as followersof Islam. It acted as a launch-pad for budding Bengali Muslim authors.The ethno-linguistic cultural politics of this society made it contribute to,rather than create a separate space outside, the existing Bengali literaryscene dominated by Bengali Hindu writers, and it was affiliated to theBangiya Sahitya Parishat, the federation of literary societies in Bengal.

When Muzaffar joined the society in 1913, it was in disarray. Alongsideprominent Bengali Muslim writers and political activists well known in theCalcutta literary circuit he contributed to its revival. Soon Muzaffar becamea full-time literary activist. Many leading writers from a Bengali Hindubackground, including one who on principle never donated his novels, gavetheir work to the Society Reading Room. Work in the literary society helpedMuzaffar develop connections with Muslim writers, journalists and politicalactivists as well as members of the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia.A minor figure associated with this society, Abdur Rezzaq Khan,became his first socialist colleague in the early 1920s. He also met his firstrecruit, Abdul Halim, in the literary society’s reading room in 1922.

Since this was voluntary work, to survive Muzaffar took up varioustemporary jobs throughout the war years. Unable to retain any employmentfor long, he was forced to shift from one to the next, as teacher, clerk,


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



translator and finally a full-time journalist. While he was a student, during asummer vacation, he taught at a madrasa (Muslim religious school) in theKidderpore dock area. Earlier madrasa education in the village is likely tohave proved useful here. He also worked as a private tutor, teaching youngboys from Muslim families. In the course of his career as a tutor in Calcutta,he stayed with the family of a nineteenth-century Urdu writer, MunshiAlimuddin, in a lively Muslim commercial area close to College Street.Muzaffar also worked briefly at the office of the Inspector of Schools.Most of these jobs were probably secured through his acquaintance withmembers of the Literary Society. Muzaffar was employed for the longeststretch at the Bengali Government Printing Press. His job was to siftthrough volumes of paper in the cavernous storage sheds of the East IndiaCompany-era Writers’ Building where the Press was located. He alsoworked as a clerk in a slaughterhouse, issuing tickets for the slaughter ofanimals but spared the unpalatable task of ‘slaughtering the animals myself’.He also accepted and soon gave up another unpleasant job. Despite areasonable salary and the risk of future unemployment, he did not continueas an official translator of Arabic and Urdu material in the Home PoliticalDepartment of the Bengal Government.27

THE REALM OF TANGLED CULTURAL POLITICS

The size of the Muslim intelligentsia was small. According to the Censusof 1911, fewer than 6,000 Muslims belonged to the civil professions.As a white-collar segment they were ‘not only outnumbered by the Hindus(in the proportion of 7 to 1)’ but ‘even less numerous’ than the Christians.28

Yet their literary activities in Calcutta attracted a great deal of officialmonitoring and censorship during the 1910s. The Urdu and Arabic pressacted as vehicles of pan-Islamic ideas. Anti-British and pan-Islamicsentiments were also voiced in the Bengali and English journals andnewspapers. They stood for joint Hindu-Muslim action against thegovernment.29

Muzaffar’s work in the literary society transformed him into a prolificwriter and so paved the way for his later turn to political journalism.The subjects he chose and the debates he participated in reflected thegradual shifts in his own intellectual and political position. The largerpolitical developments played a key role in changing the content of hiswritings. As a student in Noakhali he had been interested in politics. Afterthe Lucknow Pact of 1916 when Hindu-Muslim unity was very much in theair, he had participated in ‘all kinds’ of political meetings, including aprotest rally demanding the freedom of political prisoners. Muzaffar wasalso part of the audience that had gathered to listen to the speeches made atthe Congress and Muslim League conferences held in the city in 1917.30

He knew political figures linked with the literary society who wereprominent as Muslim League and Congress activists, but refrained from


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



joining either organization. His political position during this period wasmulti-layered and reflected a confusion of attitudes. In this sense, he wasvery much a part of the Muslim intellectual milieu in Calcutta, experiencingthe pull of identity-politics from diverse directions.

A brief examination of Muzaffar’s writings published in Bengal Muslimjournals emphasizes the fluidity of his political positions. Muzaffar’s articlesfrom the 1910s, only a few of which survive, were mainly excursions incultural polemics, conforming to contemporary middle-class notions of aBengali Muslim socio-cultural identity. Between 1916 and 1921, Muzaffarwas well acquainted with the Bengali Muslim literati and the leading literaryjournals printed during these years. Muzaffar worked as the assistant editorof Bangiyo Musalman Sahitya Patrika (Bengal Muslim Literary Journal),the organ of the Bengal Muslim Literary Society31 He composed its newspages.32 By 1919 he had earned praise in the wider Muslim literary circles asa ‘skilled writer’ whose articles were a ‘pleasure to read’ and was listed asone of the leading Bengali Muslim essayists.33

The periodicals advocated Hindu-Muslim unity and emphasized theethno-linguistic component of Bengali Muslim culture. They also reflectedthe social aspirations of the Bengali Muslim middle classes by stressingthe cultural politics of ‘self-improvement’. The first issue of BangiyaMusalman Sahitya Patrika, in 1918, while elaborating its principles, statedthis agenda clearly. The discourse of self-improvement in the Muslimmiddle-class context included the goal of becoming equal to the Hindumiddle classes in terms of education, culture and socio-economic achieve-ments. It was a fragment of the wider emphasis on ‘improvement’ and hadmotivated both Hindu and Muslim members of the proprietor classes inMuzaffar’s rural milieu.34

Emphasis on the ethno-linguistic cultural roots of Bengal Muslimsplunged these journals into lengthy debates on the language question. Therewas broad agreement that Persian-Arabic traditions provided Muslims theworld over with their spirituality and culture, and that Urdu was the vehicleof Islamic glory in India. Yet the intellectuals writing in these journals feltthat Bengali, more than any other language, was closest to the culture of theMuslims of the region. These writings projected Bengali as the ‘mothertongue’ and the language of folk culture. Muzaffar strongly endorsed thisopinion and, like the other writers in these magazines, stressed theIslamicization of content rather than form. In an article published in1917, ‘Urdu Bhasha o Bangiya Musalman’ (The Urdu Language and theBengali Muslim), he denounced all those who tried to impose Urdu onBengali Muslims, stating that no ‘Islamic wave’ could rob them of theirlanguage.35 These intellectuals also argued against the deliberate suppres-sion of Turko-Persian and Arabic words from the Bengali vocabulary byHindu writers, while encouraging the exchange of ideas, debates anddialogues with Bengali Hindu intellectuals. This was not a self-enclosedworld. Hindu women authors who wrote on the travails of the ‘respectable’


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



Bengali middle-class woman contributed to these journals and receivedpraise. Many writers from Hindu Bengali backgrounds wrote on topics ofinterest to both the Hindu and the Muslim middle-classes.36

The journals published articles in abundance on the ‘past glory of Islam’.The pre-history of Arabs, the might of the Moorish Kings in southern Spainand the literary and scientific achievements in medieval West Asia were someof the recurring themes. Evidently a useable past for Bengali Muslims wasbeing constructed in these pages. Articles on the status of Muslim womenwere also published, arguing that Islam had traditionally accorded a highplace to women and emphasizing the necessity of the veil as the marker andsite of female and communal ‘honour’. Muzaffar also participated in theongoing debate on gender and argued in favour of female education as wellas the veil.37 At this juncture, he still saw himself as a devout Muslim andwas very much a contributor to the prevailing patriarchal discourse on thefashioning of the Muslim gentlewoman. Within a couple of years, in theprocess of becoming a radical activist disaffiliating from middle-class socialconcerns, he was to question and reject this position.

Other sensitive topics discussed were Christian Anglicist and Hindurevivalist prejudices against Muslims and Islam. The ‘plight’ of wealthytenant-farmers (jotedars) and peasants (rayats) at the hands of thepredominantly Hindu landlords also found a space in poems and literarypieces and also in advertisements for agricultural services and commoditiesoffered by mostly Muslim entrepreneurs and aimed at potential buyers andconsumers of the Muslim middle class who read these periodicals. This breda sense of incipient competition with and contestation of the socio-economicpower of the Hindu propertied elements.38

A critique of the use by mainstream nationalism of Orientalist conceptshostile to Muslims and of Hindu revivalist symbols was also advancedthrough these journals. Though primarily structured to promote the socialinterests and shape the identity-thinking of the Bengali Muslim middleclasses, this critical perspective had not evolved into an outright rejectionof nationalism. Repeated attempts were made to pressure the nationalistleaders, who came from Hindu upper-caste backgrounds, into acceptingMuslims as equals.39 The underlying notion of ‘community advancement’was not without contradictions stemming from overlapping identity-structures and loyalties. An article published in 1920 in MoslemBharat (Muslim India),40 when Muzaffar was closely associated with thejournal, tried to combine socialist ideas with community development,nationalism and freedom of the individual. The article did not really succeedin conveying any central ideological position. An article by Muzaffar on aPersian Sufi published during the same year in the Bangiya MusalmanSahitya Patrika stressed the saint’s stimulation of freethinking, and arguedthat Islamic ‘orthodoxy’ had been unable to appreciate this aspect.41 This‘reformist’ position was not dissimilar to a bourgeois humanist critiqueof religion developing among a section of the liberal Bengali Muslim


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



intelligentsia.42 This particular strand of thinking remained weak and wasindicative of a lack of political direction at the heart of community-orientedconcerns: disquiet with the idea of a closed community as well as the socialneed to identify with it. Muzaffar’s engagement with Bengali Muslim liberalreformism proved to be brief. The pronouncements on gender andcommunity in the essays he wrote during 1918–19 indicate simultaneousadoption of conservative and liberal positions. None yielded a course ofpolitical action acceptable to him. In the post-war radical conjuncture,complex interactions between Muzaffar’s social location and wider classconflict solved his dilemma. Reformist individualism, with its promise of apossessive bourgeois selfhood, would no longer appeal to him.

TIES THAT BIND

Though largely conforming to the contemporary preoccupations of theBengali Muslim intelligentsia, Muzaffar was also feeling increasinglyalienated. He was not happy with the title of the Literary Society journal.He had proposed in 1918, that a name free of sectional identity be given.But the Society President felt otherwise and stressed the need to attract aMuslim readership. Muzaffar had gone along with this since ‘we did not wishto lose our old President’. However two years later, he chose to oppose such asuggestion (to stay with clear Muslim identification), made by his thenemployer and leading Bengali Muslim politician, A. K. Fazlul Haq. Those atthe fringes of these societies were being drawn into radical currents unleashedby the Russian Revolution of 1917. This process coincided with and also mayhave contributed to his gradual loss of faith in the leading figures of thecommunity, especially in their social and political judgements. Hiscorrespondence with the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam between 1918 and 1919,and their eventual meeting in 1920, can be taken as a case in point. Nazrulhad volunteered in the colonial army and become steadily politicized alonganti-colonial lines during his stay in the North West Frontier Province ofBritish India. This geographic zone, a source of alarm to the colonial state,was officially viewed as a dangerous meeting-point of Bolshevism and pan-Islam. News of the Bolshevik victory had reached Nazrul and he felt inspiredto write a story, ‘Byathar Dan’ (The Gift of Pain), published by Muzaffar inthe Literary Society journal in early 1920. To avoid police censorship,Muzaffar changed Nazrul’s explicit and eulogistic references to the RedArmy, even though he was impressed by its sentiments.43

Pabitra Gangopadhyay, a writer from Hindu middle-class backgroundwho met Muzaffar in 1919 and became his friend for life, was struck byMuzaffar’s inclination to oppose authoritarian figures. Their socialsituations were similar. Like Muzaffar, Gangopadhyay had been dependent,as a struggling lower middle-class writer, on the leading lights of Hinduliterary circles. He too had remained silent or conformed when areas ofdisagreement had arisen. One such area was the support among a section


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



of Bengali Hindu intellectuals for the British war-effort. Gangopadhyayhad also been dismayed by the loyalist positions assumed by theCongress leadership. The two men were part of informal politicaldiscussions among younger intellectuals in the wake of the BolshevikRevolution – an event they had welcomed precisely because the Britishgovernment was against it.44

SHADOW OF REVOLUTION

Fragments of radical ideas could be often glimpsed in their intellectualmilieu. These ideas, especially the revolutionary mood they conveyed, mayhave directly and indirectly encouraged the anti-authoritarian positionsbeginning to be taken by marginalized figures who could not agree withtheir elders and betters. Marx and Marxism were making their presence feltin Muzaffar’s cultural world from pre-war days. In 1912, the Bengaliand English versions of Muzaffar Ahmad’s article ‘A Successful MusalmanStudent’ were published in Prabashi and its sister organ, Modern Review.The same year Modern Review printed an article on Karl Marx by thenationalist revolutionary, Lala Hardayal.45 Censored images of revolu-tionary Russia were also seeping in during the closing years of the war,preparing the ground for a more serious engagement of the intelligentsiawith socialism. A British film on the February Revolution, celebrating thefall of Czardom and establishment of liberal democracy, was released forgeneral viewing in Calcutta during April 1917. From October onwards,the revolutionary upheavals came to be condemned in the Europeannewspapers, especially The Statesman, the voice of colonial capital.46

Sensational accounts based on descriptions by western journalists werealso in circulation.47 Muzaffar himself was to notice a tract on socialism,written in Hindi, in 1919.48 Prabashi was the first journal to showenthusiasm about the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917. In 1918other Bengali journals edited by members of the Hindu intelligentsia alsostarted displaying a positive attitude towards the Bolsheviks.49 It is difficultto pin down the extent to which these ideas influenced men like Muzaffar.However, these journals were read and many of the articles published inthem were reproduced in Bengali Muslim literary magazines. Muzaffar’sdirect links with Prabashi are also a matter of record.

DEROOTED COLLECTIVES

The lingering local patriotism of Muzaffar’s earliest writings in the urbanenvironment acted as a source of divergence from an exclusivist identity.It was linked with ideas of ‘self-improvement’, implying a search forcapitalist modernity by the rural intelligentsia. The high praise for academicmerit in ‘A Successful Musalman Student’, written while Muzaffar stilllived in the countryside, reflected this aspiration. Since the avenues of


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



‘self-improvement’were restricted in Sandwip and Noakhali, those who hadthe potential to emerge as its ideological architects had no option but tomove to the city, the showcase of colonial capital. Local patriotism and thelogic of self-improvement in such a context could be read as manifestationsof proto-capitalist thinking. The logic of agrarian improvement and‘improvement literature’ represented an ethic of profit, productivity andproperty.50 They embodied a set of values shared by Hindu and Muslimrespectable folk, and arguably by the impoverished as well as ruralproprietors.

The need to associate with people from a similar background ledMuzaffar to develop links with some students from Noakhali and withlower-class Muslim sailors from Sandwip. His associate in the BengaliMuslim Literary Society, poet Golam Mostafa, was in 1916 the assistantsecretary of Noakhali Sammilani (Noakhali Union), which had been formedby some Noakhali expatriates in Calcutta as early as 1905. MahendrakumarGhosh, a youth from a prominent Bengali Hindu landed family, was thesecretary of this association. He displayed socially egalitarian concernsand in 1916 had started the monthly periodical, Noakhali. The journal gavespace to Hindu and Muslim writers, mostly students and other youngpeople, who came from the district. The first issue began withan introductory poem by Muzaffar Ahmad, ‘Abahan’ (Exhortation),which glorified the history of the district.51 Muzaffar also attempted toestablish a school in his native Sandwip, and sought to secure officialrecognition and funds for the project.52

In a more immediate sense, contacts based on regional affiliationssignalled cravings which could not be met within an exclusively BengaliMuslim middle-class environment. These associations were primarily bornfrom a sense of district affiliation and regional loyalty. But, as socialformations, they also contained the roots of another form of identity-thinking which would, in a few years time, take Muzaffar elsewhere.This was being generated inside the milieu itself where the more sensitivesegments responded to pressures from below and expressed social dissentalong egalitarian lines. As if to indicate this, Noakhali’s opening poem, anexercise in local patriotism, was followed by an article from the editorcriticizing the government for setting up the Benaras Hindu University.He argued that this step could only strengthen Hindu high-caste tyranny,aid ‘those who profit from religion-as-business’ and undermine theeducational drive necessary to improve the condition of low-caste labourersand peasants.53 These and other anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarianviews indicated the emergence of a ‘class fraction’54 among youngermembers of the intelligentsia. These intellectuals were being drawn intosocial maelstroms challenging their own class origins. For some this led to areturn to paternalistic ‘compassionate protectionism’, or a disillusionedconformity or opportunistic surrender after a period of dissent. For others itwas a radical departure prompting ideological transition.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



FREQUENT VISITOR TO THE CALCUTTA DOCKS

Regional affiliations and overlapping identifications were also pullingMuzaffar towards the direction of workers. Muzaffar had known working-class segments in the Calcutta dock area since 1910s. For a brief periodduring the summer of 1915 he had taught at a madrasa in the port area ofKidderpore,. Since his native island, Sandwip, supplied a huge number ofseamen, he had got to know them. His initial aim may have been to keepabreast of news from home. It had developed into a concern over theconditions in which these sailors found themselves.55 From police reports onpost-war trade-unionism in the docks, it seems that the majority of seamen,who came from the ranks of impoverished Bengali Muslims of Chittagongand Noakhali in Eastern Bengal, depended for work and accommodation onbrokers with underworld connections. These brokers subjected them toextreme exploitation, appropriating the bulk of their wages. The shippingcompanies in turn tacitly encouraged the brokers, whose control of theworkforce weakened the seamen’s collective bargaining power.56

Expropriation and abuse encouraged the rise of trade-unions in the portarea. The sailors fought the shipping companies and the brokers by formingan organization in 1918 and subsequently through strikes to achieve betterworking conditions and wages.57

Muslims constituted three-quarters of the population in the CalcuttaPort,58 which played a crucial role in the British war-effort. The Port hadbeen developed as one of the most capital-intensive zones of the city.Established in the late eighteenth century, it was the indispensable organof surplus extraction from the colony. With the establishment of a state-of-the-art dock at Kidderpore in 1892, its profitability increased rapidly. It wasdirectly connected by water and rail to the rising industrial complex on theHooghly embankment and the import jetties. An electric tram service linkedit to the commercial centre making it a modern marvel. Its wharves andsheds were lit by electricity at a time when the main thoroughfares ofCalcutta were still lit by gas. Within eight years of its construction, this mostprofitable of all colonial public facilities in Calcutta was being preparedfor further improvement. A contemporary account lauded this projectand commented upon ‘the stupendous strides with which the port ofCalcutta has reached, in the last 200 years, its present position as emporiumof trade of the first magnitude under the beneficent, all powerful and world-pervading protection of the Union Jack, in spite of the ceaseless freaks of atreacherous river’.59

But ‘the beneficent, all powerful and world-pervading protection of theUnion Jack’ was not extended to the workers of the Port area who keptthis gigantic enterprise running. Kidderpore was one of the poorest wardswith abysmal living standards. It had the worst public-health record inCalcutta, a product and illustration of the desperate material conditions.The major concern to the colonial authorities was its unplanned growth,60


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



interpreted as a hindrance to order and profit. They ignored the populationliving under the constant shadow of death. Throughout the second decadeof the twentieth century, including the war years and their immediateaftermath, Kidderpore remained the most unhealthy ward in the city. It hadthe highest death rate in Calcutta. The administrative report of the CalcuttaCorporation (1912–13) blamed the ‘insanitary condition in the docks’describing it as a ‘place swarming with the flies’.

Not unexpectedly, then, Kidderpore’s dubious gift to the city was theinfluenza pandemic. Alongside plague and smallpox, it struck Calcutta in1918. A global pandemic during the closing year of the First World War,influenza reached the city by sea. It infected Kidderpore, which recorded thecity’s highest mortality rate, and from there spread rapidly.61 Caught inthe web of exploitation, poverty and pestilence, the ward proved to be one ofthe liveliest centres of labour protest in the city during 1920–21,62 a periodwhen Muzaffar was turning towards labour politics and socialism. Muzaffaralready knew the community of sailors and some of their leaders, membersof the Urdu and Bengali-speaking Muslim intelligentsia, through theoverlapping of literary and political circles.63

The majority of those affected by the influenza pandemic lived inmunicipal wards dominated by the working class. Peace in Europe meantlittle to an ordinary inhabitant of Calcutta in 1918. Acute war-inducedscarcity thrust the majority of its residents into hardship and made thedisease-ridden city desperate. Prices of essential commodities such as rice,wheat, salt, cooking oil and cloth had shot up, making life difficult even formiddle-class householders.64 Violence flared easily in this environment.Business firms were attacked and their warehouses looted. An irate Muslimmob accused them of hoarding and causing an artificial cloth-famine.The cloth riot, begun by the unemployed or semi-employed Urdu-speakingMuslim poor and directed against a section of non-Bengali Hindu rich,reflected the antagonistic divisions based on ethno-linguistic, class andreligious identities among the diasporic communities of the city.65 Thefollowing year the very same segments would join forces against colonialism,by then identified as the primary cause of hardship, and indicate the socialconvergence of sectional and nationalist mass mobilizations in an alteredpolitical context.66

RESHUFFLE AND TRANSITION

Exposure to working-class conditions and hardships during and immedi-ately after the war brought Muzaffar closer to direct politics. From a muteddistaste towards colonial authority, he was entering into a zone ofconfrontational activism. He moved towards outright opposition to therule of colonial capital and that brought with it sharp divergences from thepolitics of mainstream anti-colonial nationalism and from the claims ofexclusivist religious and ethno-linguistic identities. 1919 was a turning


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



point in Muzaffar’s career. His social milieu was being increasingly drawn

into the post-war anti-colonial upsurge. Yet he was reluctant to commit

himself to any of the existing political options. Throughout the year, a

debate raged within him about whether to remain a full-time literary

activist or to become involved in politics. In 1920, he decided in favour of

anti-colonial politics and take up political journalism. This in turn

involved him in the working-class movements being directed against both

European and Indian factory-owners in and around Calcutta. These

movements generated an interest in socialist literature and in 1921,

the intention of forming a communist organization. The social networks

he had forged during the war years continued to offer him a level of support.

Kazi Imdadul Haq, for instance, despite being a government employee,

ignored the possible repercussions, including the threat of police

harassment, and sent food to Muzaffar when the latter was in jail as the

sole ‘State Prisoner’ in Bengal during 1923. The familiar lanes, by-lanes,

lodging houses and addresses in and around College Street were the

principal means of escaping police attention. Wartime visitors to the city

later became political colleagues – J. W. Johnstone, a British soldier

stationed in wartime Calcutta, returned to the city as a representative of

the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) and the Communist

International during 1928.67

Muzaffar Ahmad had left behind a rural existence where communal,nationalist and ethno-linguistic components of social identity had yet to

assume a coherent political focus. In the city, Muzaffar’s political

position attained sharper contours. This process was mediated by his

urban social milieu, and by the political trends which touched the

Calcutta intelligentsia during the First World War. In a semi-segregated

colonial city which during the war years endured material scarcity, state

repression and racist violence, self-awareness as a racialized subject could

give shape to an intense and desperate social hostility towards

colonialism. Intersecting experiences in the city, therefore, prepared the

ground for a more intensive process of politicization in the years that

immediately followed. The war years provided an ideological environment

in which alienation from the policies of the colonial state acted, for a

while, as a bridge between mainstream nationalism dominated by the

Hindu proprietorial classes and the Muslim intelligentsia. Nowhere were

the multiple layers of Muslim intellectual thought more apparent than in

the cultural writings of the period, simultaneously revealing identity-

formation and identity-crisis. In the post-war period anti-imperialist mass

upsurge and labour militancy, in his immediate environment and beyond,

facilitated a dialectical interplay between the two which opened up

various ideological options before the Muslim intellectuals, including the

socialist alternative.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



CONCLUSIONS

In the immediate post-war period (1919–21) Muzaffar’s fully-fledged entryinto political journalism played a key role in his political transformationalong leftist lines. This was shaped by the working-class upsurge in Calcuttaand by the impact on Muzaffar and some of his contemporaries of socialistideas following the success of the Russian Revolution. The ‘reshuffling’ andmutations of self which gave rise to his new political identity were rooted inthis context. It was related to a complex process of disaffiliation fromexisting structures of anti-colonial politics and was underlined by a breakwith the outlook of mainstream leaders and the dominant ideologies theyrepresented.

The first socialist nucleus in Calcutta, with Muzaffar as the principalorganizer, emerged in 1922. His links with the Third CommunistInternational, circulation of banned political literature and communicationswith other anti-colonial radicals led to his arrest in 1923 and the followingyear he faced trial in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case. Muzaffar wasreleased in 1925 and returned to Calcutta early in 1926 to join the firstsocialist organization in Bengal, contributing to its growth and activities.The political development of Muzaffar Ahmad between 1913 and 1929coincided with a significant phase in the social and political history of Indiaand the world.

These years also connect two crisis-points in the history of imperialismand capitalism: 1913, the eve of the First World War, and 1929, the year ofthe Wall Street Crash which set off the Great Depression. They enclose aperiod within which socialist ideas and communist activity becamepolitically familiar in different parts of the globe. The success of theBolshevik Revolution and the formation of the Third CommunistInternational directly boosted these currents. Socialism came to be perceivedby many in the colonizing and colonized countries as a viable alternativeand a solution to the problems posed by capitalism and imperialism in themidst of economic crisis and war. A radicalization of political culturecould be felt among the intelligentsia in various urban centres of the worldfrom Cairo to Shanghai. Calcutta was no exception. Many sociallyalienated, economically distressed and politically dissatisfied urban intellec-tuals stood at the crossroads of established and radical identity-formations.Among them, there was a small ‘fraction’ informed by social radicalismfrom below and the leftward turn in literary and cultural fields. They weredisaffiliating themselves from the more established political routes open tothose from their social background to combat colonialism and affiliatingthemselves with a more radical vision of decolonization.

1913 was the year of Muzaffar’s migration to Calcutta. 1929 marked theend of a phase in his political career as a pioneer of the communistmovement as it had emerged in Bengal and India of the 1920s. It was alsothe year when leading communists were arrested and then tried in the


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



Cou

rtes

y of

the

Wor

king

Cla

ss M

ovem

ent L

ibra

ry.

Orig

inal

Cop

yrig

ht-h

olde

r no

t kno

wn.

Fig. 4. Portrait of the Meerut prisoners whose challenge against conspiracy convictions lasted from 1929 to 1933. Back page of pamphlet by Clemens Dutt,

‘Conspiracy Against the King’, published by The National Meerut Prisoners’ Defence Committee, 23 Great Ormond Street, London, June 1930.

Back row (left to right): K. N. Sehgal, S. S. Josh, H. L. Hutchinson, Shaukat Usmani, B. F. Bradley, A. Prasad, P. Spratt, G. Adhikari.

Middle row: R. R. Mitra, Gopen Chakravarti, Kishori Lal Ghosh, L. R. Kadam, D. R. Thengdi, Gouri Shankar, S. Bannerjee, K. N. Joglekar, P. C. Joshi,

Muzaffar Ahmad.

Front Row: M. G. Desai, D. Goswami, R. S. Nimbkar, S. S. Mirajkar, S. A. Dange, S. V. Ghate, Gopal Basak.

at Jawaharlal Nehru University on November 13, 2013 http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from



Meerut Conspiracy Case, the longest judicial proceedings against politicalopponents mounted by the state in British India. Muzaffar Ahmad was chiefamong those accused at Meerut, a factor which enhanced the prestige ofthe Bengal communists in the 1930s and influenced their rapid growth.The 1930s also saw the recruitment of a considerable section of theHindu middle-class youth, disenchanted with the waning radicalism ofmilitant revolutionary politics, and a widening communist influence amongpeasants and workers. By 1947, the CPI had emerged as the third largestpolitical formation in British India. The advance was met with setbacks,however, for 1947, the year of Indian independence, was marked by thebloodbath and displacements which accompanied the partition of thecountry. Bengal was divided, signifying the triumph of dominant identity-formations. The following year, the CPI was banned in parts of India andMuzaffar was reimprisoned. In later years, he organized primarily in WestBengal, and Calcutta continued to be his base. As a senior CPI centralcommittee member in 1964, he advocated the formation of a new communistorganization independent of Moscow and Peking. He faced incarcerationfor the last time during the same decade when already in his seventies, anddied a few years later in 1973.68

During the second decade of the century, as we have seen, Muzaffar hadfound employment as a private tutor and lived in the house of a nineteenth-century Urdu writer, the late Munshi Alimuddin. Whenever the spectre ofdestitution visited him in the early 1920s, Muzaffar sought asylum in thishouse. Towards the end of his life this indirect association was rekindled bya strange coincidence. The Bengal headquarters of Muzaffar’s party came tobe located on a street named after Alimuddin. The office was later moved toa new building on the same street, which was posthumously named afterMuzaffar. It continues to be the headquarters of a party which emerged outof the divisions within the communist left and has hegemonized politics inWest Bengal since 1977. Muzaffar came to the city to become a writer, andso in some sense follow in Munshi Alimuddin’s footsteps, but migrationembroiled him in experiences and a new sense of identity which took himaway from his original goal.

Muzaffar Ahmad had wished to devote himself to thoughtful essayson the glories of Islamic culture. He gradually involved himself in politicalactivities instead. His political experiences as a marginalized figure on thefringes of society made him focus on the larger anti-colonial struggle.They also made him support the confused political ideology of Bengalimiddle-class Muslims who were unable to separate themselves from eithersectional or ethno-linguistic identities. The contradictions bred by thesediverging and converging forms of political consciousness, combined withthe unabashed hatred of Hindu chauvinists towards all aspects of Islam andMuslims, made Muzaffar reject the ethos of cultural nationalism, dominatedby a Hindu Bengali intelligentsia steeped in Hindu imagery. Opposition toBritish rule and friendship with non-communal, socially marginalized


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



Bengali Hindu middle-class intellectuals led him to oppose the orthodoxelements within the so-called community and favour a united oppositionto imperialism. He began to harbour doubts about the claims of Muslimleaders who insisted that they represented the interests of all Muslims,and also of nationalist leaders from high-caste Hindu property-owningbackgrounds who claimed to represent all Indians. Involvement in themilitant labour politics which shook Calcutta and its suburbs in 1920–21,a simultaneous switch to radical journalism which increasingly made himwrite about the political movements of workers and peasants, and a growinginterest in Marxian socialism and workers’ power mediated by the BolshevikRevolution of 1917, further weakened his attachment to a Bengali Muslimmiddle-class identity caught between sectional, ethno-linguistic and nation-alist political considerations. City life had encouraged him towards newstructures of social interdependence absent in the village. In the complexweb of urban struggles, perceptions of the self and society were changing.Communitarian values, imbibed through Islamic congregationist religiouspractice as well as heterodox socio-literary collectivities, were beingreconfigured and transformed to arrive at a social understanding andpolitical recognition of transcommunal oppressions. This meant goingbeyond the community. In 1919, Muzaffar Ahmad was on the verge of anideological transition. By reshuffling his political consciousness, the waryears had prepared the ground for this shift towards radicalization.

This ‘fraction’ Muzaffar represented increased in size during the secondhalf of the 1920s with the inclusion of sections of the Hindu Bengaliintelligentsia, politically alienated from different strands of nationalism.However, throughout the 1920s, the actual size of the left in Bengalremained very small. The first socialist organization in Bengal, led by thecommunists, made its presence felt in the late 1920s primarily amongworkers in the industrial suburbs of Calcutta. The failure to expand amongthe rural poor indicated the restricted reach of left activism. Plainly,the communists and socialists could not overcome the greater politicalappeal enjoyed by nationalist and communal formations. In his laterautobiographical writings, Muzaffar explored reasons for the fragility ofa ‘class’-based movement at this time, facing state repression, the hostility ofmore established political formations and hampered by its own innercontradictions.

During the 1930s many disenchanted younger members of the revolu-tionary terrorist circles turned to Marxism while in prison. Their transitionwas facilitated by a material process: the shedding of all social links withlanded property by a sizeable section of the Hindu bhadralok (that is, theeducated middle class) who, it has been claimed, became dependent onprofessions from this period.69 Their entry coincided with the widening ofthe CPI mass base among workers and peasants. The increase in the size ofthe organization in turn led to Muzaffar’s eclipse as the central figure of thecommunist movement in Bengal.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



Muzaffar and other early communists journeyed from obscurity in the

political wilderness to become leftist veterans who paved the way for theemergence of a mass movement in colonial and post-independence India.This article has sought to explain the particular routes Muzaffar Ahmadexplored before he turned towards left radicalism. In May 1928 whenMuzaffar Ahmad was suffering from ‘failing health’ and ‘mental worries’, a

colleague wrote to him:

Biography of . . . pioneers is the history of trials and vicissitudes. It is only

the opportunistic scalp that thrives under the Raj of Capital . . .Havepatience and confidence . . .better days are coming.70

Despite the consolation offered, the ‘trials and vicissitudes’ continued tohaunt Muzaffar. They were not necessarily replaced by ‘better days’. Still, heremained committed ‘to life which is lived only once’ and remarked towardsthe end of his life: ‘My attachment to atheist materialism increases each day.It is said, as people grow older they become increasingly inclined towards

the spirit. In my case, I notice the very opposite. With each passing year,I am becoming even more attached to [the world of] matter.’71 During theyears immediately following the First World War, this was only one of hismany realizations in a city that remade him.

Suchetana Chattopadhyay is Lecturer in History at Jadavpur University,Kolkata, India. She completed her doctoral dissertation on MuzaffarAhmad and the early socialist movement in Calcutta during the 1910s and

the 1920s at SOAS, University of London, in 2005. Besides the histories ofcommunism and socialism, her research interests also include urban socialhistory, working-class history, colonial surveillance and imperialmasculinity.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

This article cites primary sources collected from colonial administrative and surveillancedocuments. ‘IB’ stands for Intelligence Branch records of the Bengal Police. See footnotesfor the full references for Muzaffar Ahmad’s writings in contemporary Bengali journals(‘B’ stands for Bengali periodicals in the notes below) and his autobiographical accounts,Samakaler Katha (Story of My Times), Kazi Nazrul Islam: Smritikatha (Kazi Nazrul Islam:Reminiscences) and Amar Jiban o Bharater Communist Party (My Life and the CommunistParty of India), which the text heavily draws upon. These writings provide clues to anddescriptions of his thinking during his early years as a migrant in the city. Memoirs bycontemporaries are also cited to grasp the thoughts and actions of a segment of the Bengaliintelligentsia during the war.

I am indebted to Professor Peter Robb and to Anna Davin, Andrew Whitehead and othereditors of History Workshop Journal for their comments on the draft which paved the way forthis article.

1 The phrase ‘reshuffling of the self’ can be found in Carl E. Schorske, ‘Introduction’,Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, 1981, p. xviii.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



2 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early TwentiethCenturies’, and ‘Renaissance and Kaliyuga: Time, Myth and History in Colonial Bengal’,in Writing Social History, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 169, 190; Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: HinduCommunalism and Partition, 1932–1947, Delhi, 1995, pp. 8–12. This social logic which steeredthe Hindu landed gentry toward colonial education and white-collar jobs could extend toMuslim landed families as well. For a detailed study, see Mohammad Shah, In Search of anIdentity: Bengali Muslims 1880–1940, Calcutta, 1996.

3 See Imperial Gazetteer of India, Eastern Bengal and Assam, Calcutta, 1909;J. E. Webster, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers, Noakhali, Allahabad, 1911;W. H. Thompson, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District ofNoakhali 1914 to 1919, Calcutta, 1920; Rajkumar Chakraborty and Anangomohan Das,Sandwiper Itihas (History of Sandwip), Calcutta, Bengali periodicxals (henceforth ‘B’) 1330/1923–24. Also Muzaffar Ahmad, Samakaler Katha (Story of My Times), 1963, Fourth Edition,1996, pp. 6–7.

4 Amiya Kumar Bagchi, ‘Wealth and Work in Calcutta 1860–1921’, in Calcutta: theLiving City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhury, Vol. 1, Calcutta, 1995, p. 216.

5 Report of the Municipal Administration of Calcutta 1912–13, Corporation of Calcutta.For the social impact of nocturnal illumination on metropolitan urban existence, see JoachimSchlor, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930, London, 1998, pp. 58–9.

6 Suranjan Das, ‘The Politics of Agitation: Calcutta 1912–1947’, in Calcutta: the LivingCity, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Vol. 2, Calcutta, 1995, p. 16.

7 Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interestsin Calcutta City Politics, 1875–1939 Delhi, 1979, pp. 4–6.

8 Report of the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, 1912–13.9 Report of the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, 1912–13.10 Report on Native Newspapers, 1914.11 Report on Native Newspapers, 1914–16. For a dissection of the apocalyptic mood which

characterized major cities, such as New York, on the eve of the First World War, see MikeDavis, Dead Cities and Other Tales, New York, 2002, pp. 7, 9. The ‘ruptured spleen’ syndrome(euphemism for racist homicide of ‘native’ domestic servants) was also prevalent in other partsof the Empire. For a survey of the African colonies, see Jock McCulloch, ‘Empire and Violence,1900–1939’, in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine, Oxford, 2004. Sumit Sarkar employsthe phrase ‘protectionist compassion’ in ‘Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society’, in WritingSocial History, p. 280.

12 Das, ‘The Politics of Agitation’, p. 17; John H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a PluralSociety, Berkeley, 1968, pp. 14, 62–5, 113–5, 117–22, 162–5; Kenneth McPherson, MuslimMicrocosm: Calcutta 1918 to 1935, Wiesbaden, 1974, pp. 1–19, 20–54; Richard J. Popplewell,Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire,1904–1924, London, 1995, p. 79.

13 John Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj: the Social and Political Significance of the StudentCommunity in Bengal c.1870–1922’, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1986,p. 356; David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of RegionalNationalism in India, 1905–1942, Calcutta, 1975, pp. 6–7.

14 Ahmad, Amar Jiban o Bharater Communist Party (My Life and the Communist Partyof India), Calcutta, 1969, 5th edn, 1996, p. 24.

15 Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, pp. 305–6, 308–9, 352, 384; Ajitkumar Basu, KolikatarRajpath, Samaje o Sanskritite (Streets of Calcutta, In Society and Culture), Calcutta, 1996,pp. 339, 342, 346–7; Debasis Bose, ‘College Street’, in Calcutta: the Living City, ed. Chaudhury,vol. 2, p. 219.

16 Report on Native Newspapers, 1914–15. For a treatment of criminality in the city, seeDebraj Bhattacharya, ‘Kolkata ‘‘Underworld’’ in the Early 20th Century’, Economic andPolitical Weekly, 38: 38, 2004.

17 Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, pp. 217, 246–53, 384; Chandiprasad Sarkar, The BengaliMuslim:, a Study in their Politicization (1912–1929), Calcutta, 1991, pp. 41–2; MuzaffarAhmad, Kazi Nazrul Islam: Smritikatha (Kazi Nazrul Islam: Reminiscences), Calcutta, 1965,9th edn, 1998, pp. 1, 16; Report on Native Newspapers, 1916. McPherson, Muslim Microcosm,p. 4; Census of India, 1911, vol. 6, Calcutta I. According to the 1911 Census women constituted15% of the city population. Among them one-fourth worked at various occupations and ofthese a quarter were prostitutes.

18 Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, pp. 249, 253; Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 20–1.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



19 Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, pp. 135, 242–3, 249; Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, p. 8.20 Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, pp. 249–50; Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 20, 25–6; Basu,

Kolikatar Rajpath, pp. 346–7.21 Berwick, ‘Chatra Samaj’, pp. 239–40, 305–6; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, pp. 10–11;

Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 391–2.22 Muzaffar Ahmad, Myself and the Communist Party of India 1920–1929, Calcutta, 1970,

p. 12; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 27–8 (italics mine). The political dimensions of the song arediscussed in Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and CulturalNationalism, Delhi, 2001, pp. 176–81. Also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Bande Mataram: theBiography of a Song, Delhi, 2003.

23 This aspect is discussed later.24 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 19–23; Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 1–2; Ahmad, Amar

Jiban, pp. 35–8.25 For a recent discussion on Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft and Indian nationalism, see Rajat

Kanta Ray, Nationalism, Modernity and Civil Society: the Subalternist Critique and After,Calcutta, 2007.

26 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 19–23.27 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 19–23; Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp.1–2; Ahmad, Amar

Jiban, pp. 35–8.28 Census of India, 1911, vol. 6, Calcutta I.29 Report on Native Newspapers, 1914–1916; McPherson, Muslim Microcosm, pp. 29,

30, 41.30 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 23, 84; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, p. 30.31 Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 22, 26, 232; ‘Bir’, Al-Eslam 1: 7, B 1322/1916.32 ‘Samiti Sangbad’ (Society News), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 3, B 1326/1919;

‘Samiti Sangbad’ (Society News), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 4, B 1326/1919;‘Sangkalan’ (Compilation), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 3, B 1326/1919; ‘Sangkalan’(Compilation) 2: 4, B 1326/1919; ‘Sangkalan’ (Compilation), Bangiya Musalman SahityaPatrika 3: 1, B 1327/1920; ‘Daktar Husayan’ (Dr Husayan), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika3: 1, B 1327/1920.

33 Saogat 1: 5, B 1325/1919.34 Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 1: 1, B 1325/1918; also Anisuzzaman,

Muslim Banglar Samayik Patrika (List of Bengali Muslim Periodicals), Dhaka, 1969,pp. 201–4.

35 Anisuzzaman, Muslim Banglar Samayik Patrika, pp. 203–4; ‘Urdu Bhasha o BangaliMusalman’, Al-Eslam, Sraban, B 1324/1917; Chandiprasad Sarkar, The Bengali Muslims: aStudy in their Politicization, pp. 66–7.

36 Anisuzzaman, Muslim Banglar Samayik Patrika, pp. 201–56.37 ‘Patrer Uttar’ (Reply to Sudhakanto Raychoudhury), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya

Patrika 2: 4, B1326/1919; ‘Narir Mulya o Islam’er Jer-alochona (The continuing discussion onthe status of women and Islam), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 3: 1, B1327/1920.

38 Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 1: 2, B 1325/1918; Bangiya Musalman SahityaPatrika 2, 4, B 1326/1919; Saogat 1: 1, B 1325/1919.

39 Al-Eslam, 3 May 1915–5 May 1916; Saogat 1: 1, B 1325/1919.40 Moslem Bharat, Asvin, B 1327/1920.41 ‘Imam Al-Ghazzali’, Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 1: 2, B1325/1918.42 Tanzeen M. Murshid, The Sacred and the Secular: Bengal Muslim Discourses 1871–1977

Calcutta, 1995, pp. 130–1.43 Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 1–2, 26–7, 105–10.44 Pabitra Gangopadhyay, Chalaman Jiban (Journey through Life), Calcutta, 1994, pp.

66–7, 93, 100, 205.45 Modern Review 11: 3, March 1912. In December 1912 Muzaffar Ahmad’s article

‘A Successful Musalman Student’ appeared in Modern Review. Its Bengali version was printedin Prabashi.

46 Satis Pakrasi, Agnijuger Katha (The Burning Times), Calcutta, 3rd edn, 1982,pp. 105, 109.

47 ‘Introduction’, Bangalir Samyabad Charcha (Communist Thinking in Bengal), ed. SipraSarkar and Anamitra Das, Calcutta, 1998; Sarojnath Ghosh, Rusiyar Pralay, Calcutta, 1920.

48 Ahmad, Smritikatha, p. 110.49 ‘Introduction’, Bangalir Samyabad Charcha, ed. Sarkar and Das.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



50 Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘Modernity, Postmodernity or Capitalism?’, in Capitalism and theInformation Age: the Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution, ed. Robert W.McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, Kharagpur, 2001, p. 40. MeiksinsWood argues that the model of agrarian capitalism which emerged in England found expressionin a distinctive ideology of improvement. For recent treatments of ‘improvement ideology’among Muslim agrarian populations of East Bengal, see Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘Muslim PeasantImprovement, Pir Abu Bakr and the Formation of Communalized Islam’, in Carving Blocs:Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth Century Bengal, Delhi, 1999, pp. 64–108; also SumitSarkar, ‘Two Muslim Tracts for Peasants: Bengal 1909–1910’, Beyond Nationalist Frames:Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History, Delhi, 2002, pp. 96–111.

51 Noakhali 1: 1, B 1322/1916; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, p. 83; Ahmad, Smritikatha, p. 40.52 Hassan Mohammad, Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad O Banglar Communist Andolan

(Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad and the Communist Movement in Bengal), Chattagram, 1989,p. 99.

53 Mahendrakumar Ghosh, ‘Katha O Karjyo’ (Word and Deed), Noakhali 1: 2, B 1323/1916.

54 ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’, in Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism andCulture, London, 1980. Williams describes avant-garde intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Circleas a ‘fraction’, isolated from the general directions of the upper classes.

55 Ahmad, Amar Jiban, p. 83.56 IB 294 A/20 (133/1920); IB 294/20 (134/1920); Ray, Urban Roots, p. 96.57 IB 294 A/20 (133/1920); IB 294/20 (134/1920).58 Census of India, 1921, vol. 4, part 1.59 A. K. Roy, ‘A Short History of Calcutta: Town and Suburbs’, Census of India, vol. 7,

part 1, Calcutta 1901, p. 130. For a detailed study of the Calcutta Port’s profitability andgrowth during the nineteenth century see Prajnananda Banerjee, Calcutta and Its Hinterland,1833–1900, Calcutta, 1975, pp. 24–69.

60 E. P. Richards, ‘C.I.T. Report on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning ofCalcutta and Contiguous Areas, Hertfordshire, 1914’, pp. 10–11, quoted in Ray, Urban Roots,p. 5.

61 Report on Municipal Administration of Calcutta for the Year 1918–19.62 Report of the Committee on Industrial Unrest, 1921, pp. 1,194–265.63 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, p. 20; Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 2, 47.64 McPherson, Muslim Microcosm, pp. 33, 37. He points out that by early 1918, prices had

risen by 78% but wages had remained static since 1914 (p. 35).65 Broomfield, Elite Conflict, p. 122; Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 1905–1947,

New Delhi, 1993, pp. 61, 67.66 Sarkar, Modern India, p. 194.67 Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 38, 83, 113–4, 263–6, 268, 292–3, 460.68 For a biographical account, see Mortuza Khaled, A Study in Leadership: Muzaffar

Ahmad and the Communist Movement in Bengal, Calcutta, 2001.69 For discussions on the ideological shift from revolutionary nationalism to communism,

see Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left. Partha Chatterjee has briefly pointed outthe changing relationship between the Hindu Bengali intelligentsia and landed property inBengal 1920–1947: the Land Question, Calcutta, 1984.

70 IB file number censored.71 Ganashakti (People’s Power), Muzaffar Ahmad Janmoshatobarsho Sankhya (Muzaffar

Ahmad Birth Centenary Edition), Calcutta, 1989, pp. 119, 230.


at Jawaharlal N


ovember 13, 2013


Dow

nloaded from



Hist Workshop J 2007 Chattopadhyay 212 39

Documents

Transcript of Hist Workshop J 2007 Chattopadhyay 212 39