Subho Basu

The Dialectics of Resistance: Colonial Geography, Bengali Literati and the Racial Mapping of Indian Identity

Through a study of hitherto unexplored geography textbooks written in Bengali between 1845 and 1880, this paper traces the evolution of a geographic information system related to ethnicity, race, and space. This geographic information system impacted the mentality of emerging educated elites in colonial India who studied in the newly established colonial schools and played a critical role in developing and articulating ideas of the territorial nation-state and the rights of citizenship in India. The Bengali Hindu literati believed that the higher location of India in such a constructed hierarchy of civilizations could strengthen their claims to rights of citizenship and self-government. These nineteenth century geography textbooks asserted clearly that high caste Hindus constituted the core ethnicity of colonial Indian society and all others were resident outsiders. This knowledge system, rooted in geography/ethnicity/race/space, and related to the hierarchy of civilizations, informed the Bengali intelligentsias notion of core ethnicity in the future nation-state in India with Hindu elites at its ethnic core.

Strikes and ‘Communal’ Riots in Calcutta in the 1890s: Industrial Workers, Bhadralok Nationalist Leadership and the Colonial State

The growth of industrial suburbs with a large working-class population around Calcutta in the final years of the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the politics on the streets of the ‘second city’ of the British empire. The increasing concentration of a large industrial work force in the newly growing mill towns around Calcutta in these years was accompanied by frequent industrial action and violent confrontations between the colonial law enforcement agencies and various sections of factory operatives in the city and the suburban mill towns. In the 1890s, when the Indian Jute Mill Association (hereafter IJMA) extended working hours and increased the work load in the factories, Calcutta and suburban mill towns witnessed numerous strikes. In 1895 these strikes frightened the jute mill owners so much that the IJMA pleaded with the government to reorganize police forces in the mill municipalities in order to protect the European managerial staff from the wrath of angry workers.

DILEMMAS OF PARLIAMENTARY COMMUNISM

In 2011, after thirty-four years in power, the Communist Party of IndiaMarxist–led Left Front in West Bengal was voted out of power. The Left Front was the worlds longest running communist government to be elected to office. The Left Front governed a population larger than most European, African, and Latin American democracies. This essay examines the rise and decline of the parliamentary communist movement in Bengal. The authors argue that the prominence of the communist movement can be traced to a social imaginaire and a notion of “social citizenship” that the (undivided) communists developed through their participation in grassroots-level workers, peasants, and refugee movements, and equally crucially, through hegemonic interventions in “culture” since the 1940s. This social imaginaire became the basis of a “commonsensical idiom” in Bengal through the political practice of the communists, parliamentary and otherwise. The decline of the parliamentary communist influence started when their core constituency of peasants and workers perceived them to be violating this basis of social citizenship in the wake of their adoption of neoliberal policies of development beginning in the 1990s. The regional noncommunist opposition in West Bengal in 2011 captured the imagination of the electorate by appropriating and translating this long developed notion of social citizenship against the Left government.

Knowledge for Politics: Partisan Histories and Communal Mobilization in India and Pakistan

In late April 2003, a number of historians working on India in the United States received an online petition against the appointment of Romila Thapar, a historian of ancient India, to the Kluge Chair at the Library of Congress. It may seem surprising that such an academic appointment can generate political heat in the expatriate Indian community. Yet the appointment sparked off an orchestrated political campaign on the internet. The petition, entitled “Protest US Supported Marxist Assault Against Hindus,” argues that Romila Thapar is responsible for cultural genocide against Hindus.1