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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 December 2019
The year 1937 saw the establishment of Congress Ministries in eight of the eleven provinces in which the provincial elections had been held, Bihar being one of them. The resounding victory of the Congress which secured a clear majority in the province of Bihar and the dismal performance of the Muslim League seemed at the time to depict the mood of the people in general. It was taken as a clear rejection of the politics of communalism and separatism and as an expression of faith in the secular credentials of the Indian National Congress. However, less than a decade later, the province was gripped by severe communal tensions and had become one of the most prominent parts of India from where the movement for Pakistan drew support. This article thus explores the nature of the communal violence that occurred in Bihar in 1946 against the backdrop of the ‘escalating’ communal tensions during the late 1930s and early 1940s. It seeks to problematise the dichotomy that exists in literature on communal violence between moments of what have been called ‘extraordinary’ violence (such as riots) and the everyday structures of (what Gyanendra Pandey has called) ‘routine violence’. Through its analysis of contemporary material produced by the Muslim League, the Congress Ministry and the provincial British administration to explain the causes of the 1946 riots in Bihar, it argues that it is in the moments of rupture presented by riots that everyday structures of violence are trivialised or normalised through processes of ‘dichotomisation’, ‘dehumanisation’ and ‘denial’.
The Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University and SASNET, Department of Political Science, and the Centre for Theology and Religious Studies at Lund University provided generous financial and logistical support for carrying out and writing up the research presented in this article. I am thankful to Niels Brimnes, Uwe Skoda and Radhika Chopra for all their valuable feedback on various drafts of the article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for all their constructive insights and suggestions that have helped greatly in improving it. Last but not the least, I am thankful to Biswamoy Pati whose guidance will always be valued and missed by me.
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67 Ibid. p. 19.
68 Other pamphlets such as ‘Muzloomin-e-Bihar’ (oppressed Muslims of Bihar) by Syed Ezazuddin, Salar-i-awal Camp Mohalla Darzi Tola, Patna and ‘Matam-i-Bihar’ (the lament for Bihar) by Munshi Muhammad Faruq of Monghyr, which had been in wide circulation in different parts of the province, contained the same language of disbelief at the sheer enormity of the magnitude of violence and emphasis on the role of the provincial Congress government.
69 Ibid.
70 Fortnightly reports 1946, IOR/L/P&J/5/181, BL.
71 Ibid.
72 Reports on Information regarding certain --- concerning the communal disturbances e.g. number of Muslims in affected provinces, Communal history of the worst affected areas, part played by the different castes in the riots, action against officers, File no. 314/1947 Political Special Department, BSA.
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77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Excerpt from a letter written by one L. P. Singh, Additional District Magistrate of Patna District to the Commissioner N. Baksi, ibid..
80 Das, Mirrors of Violence, p. 28.
81 Ibid.
82 Communal Petitions submitted to Mahatma Gandhi, File no. 316/47, Political Special, BSA.
83 On 27 July 1946 Muhammad Ali Jinnah called upon Muslims to observe 16 August 1946 as the Direct Action Day for the demand for Pakistan to be fulfilled at any cost and with methods beyond constitutional ones. The day is also marked as the Calcutta Killings.
84 File no. 314/1947, BSA.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid.
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90 Ibid.
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92 ‘Sir H. Dow (Bihar) to Field Marshall Viscount Wavell 22/23 November 1946’, in The Transfer of Power, (eds.) Mansergh and Moon, p. 148.
93 This theoretical framework of the ‘production of communal riots’ has been expounded in depth by Paul R. Brass. See his The Production of Hindu-Muslim Violence in Contemporary India, pp. 355–384.
94 Pamphlet entitled ‘Kya Bihar Kaand ke Liye Hindu Zimmedar Hain?’ By one Kaushal Prasad Jain, Jai Bharat Sahitya Mandal Ltd., 1946, NMML (translation mine)
95 Ibid.
96 Even through there can be overlaps.
97 Amin, Shahid, Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992 (Berkeley, 1995), pp. 1–6Google Scholar. Chauri Chaura is a small town near Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh (the United Provinces in colonial times) that came into prominence in 1922 when the violent incident of a few local people from the town who set fire to the local police station became the cause for the ending of the Non-Cooperation Movement by Gandhi.