To add another lens to the event, I will refer briefly to two accounts – one intellectual and long-distant one and the other a direct witness – of the killings in Calcutta, from Nirad C Chaudhuri and Ashis Nandy. Chaudhuri had left Calcutta for good in 1942, but he had friends and relatives in the city that passed on information. Nandy was nine years old and new to the city.
In his memoir, Thy Hand Great Anarch! Chaudhuri writes with characteristic bluntness:
“The unwillingness of the Government of Bengal was certainly intentional, and if they at last asked for military intervention that was only to save themselves from the obvious charge of being behind the massacres. It is also possible that they asked for military help when they saw that the game of killing was going against Muslims.”
The fact of a leader or government abetting crime often happens through carefully crafted acts of prevention of duty (which is prevention of law and justice). It is difficult in retrospect to hold them responsible as the motivational aspects behind such facts are clouded by claims that befuddle and confuse interpretation. Objectivity must negotiate with suspicion and good faith. This false challenge is deliberately created to withhold judgment. Chaudhuri blames Suhrawardy’s intentionality from facts. Governmental dilly-dallying in taking decisions when there is an outbreak of mass violence and lives are at stake comes from political reluctance. This nefarious tradition became the norm in postcolonial India where minorities have been targeted. Here’s a clinching detail from an official about Suhrawardy’s delaying tactic to ensure that he had enough deaths for his cause:
“The Calcutta Police Commissioner, Donald Ross Hardwick, said that he had ‘very little time to study the situation’ because Suhrawardy was constantly in the Control Room and entered into ‘discussions’ with him. Other British officials also agreed that he caused unnecessary confusion by bombarding them with questions and impractical suggestions.”
Janam Mukherjee’s highly speculative reading of the situation argues, rather than Suhrawardy, or the state administration, allegedly controlling the riots from the Control Room, it was the lack of control that characterised the Calcutta riots. Mukherjee, however, mentions that the chief minister, sitting in the Control Room with the police commissioner, was “worrying incessantly about fellow Muslims”. It is not a detail that instils confidence. Joya Chatterji writes: “Suhrawardy’s culpability is by now a well-established tradition. But Hindu leaders were also deeply implicated, a fact which is less well known.”
What makes Chatterjee think that public perception involving people who suffered the riots deserves to be treated with intellectual sarcasm? It is possible that many among those who suffered the riots were communal. Does their being communal completely falsify their knowledge and opinion of the riots? People’s mindsets do colour facts, but the fact that Suhrawardy was in power and his activities in the Police Control Room were fishy are corroborated by sources independent of Hindus who faced the riots in Calcutta. To call that informed opinion a “tradition” with an air of disbelief is elitist disdain masquerading as the self-critical “Hindu” scholar.
The fact that Hindu leaders were involved does not overturn the asymmetry vis-à-vis the responsibility of the Muslim League that was in power. Administrative culpability is the established story behind all riots in postcolonial India whose template was set in 1946 Bengal and ruthlessly imitated the same year in Bihar.
Chaudhuri mentions an important detail about the massacres, which explains the ruthless and timid logic of how such riots are executed over a vulnerable people:
“It must not be imagined, however, that there were pitched battles between the communities. That would have resulted in fewer deaths and put a stop to the violence sooner by making it too costly. But what was carried out was the slaughter of Hindus by the Muslims where the latter were a majority, and vice-versa.”
Chaudhuri offers his scathing criticism of the unreliable nature of social behaviour in an atmosphere of radical uncertainty:
“The immediate impact of the massacre in Calcutta was seen in an exhibition by both the communities which in its silly maudlinity should have been regarded as an insult to the dead, but was regarded by weak Bengalis as a ‘miracle’. The Hindus and Muslims joined one another in processions, chanted that they were brothers, and embraced one another. This could not bring back the dead, although it served to wipe off some of the shame…
The futility of weak repentance was demonstrated very soon. The violence spread at once to the villages of East Bengal, and in the district of Noakhali in the south the Muslim attacks on the Hindus were on a very large scale. This made Mahatma Gandhi go on a tour of the district on foot, preaching peace. I felt the Noakhali disturbances even in Delhi.”
The politics of communalism seeks to manipulate grief and transform it into mass anger so that it can be prepared for violence.
Ashis Nandy describes living in a third-floor apartment of the Calcutta YMCA where his father worked. He could see the slums of migrant North Indian Muslim labourers from his window. Beyond the slum were a couple of localities belonging to lower- and middle-class Bengali Hindus, and further away, another slum of Muslim migrants. Before 16 August, people in the slums flew the Muslim League flag, beat drums and shouted aggressive slogans. On the 16th, the slum dwellers sharpened their knives, and by evening they resorted to violence. The police was “openly partisan” in Nandy’s observation. The workers at YMCA, comprising both communities, helped 200 Hindu families escape by putting up a ladder on the high wall of the compound. “The radio worsened things,” writes Nandy, with officials censoring stories. When a government wants to lie to the people, it makes the media its accomplice, misusing the reputation (and also exposing the myth) of a neutral and truthful media. The tragedy is that people will still allow themselves to believe the news on the radio because it holds the mysterious power of a source that is legitimised by its existence as a singular, authoritative voice.
Nandy writes that after the Muslim charge, it took a couple of days for the Hindus to regroup and counter-attack. The atmosphere in the YMCA building, hosting Muslim families, surprised a young Nandy: “Strangely, there was no hostility between the communities within the building, among either the riot victims or those serving them.”
This strangeness is sharply explored and explained by Sadat Hasan Manto in his autobiographical story, Shyam: Krishna’s Flute.
During Partition, Manto and his friend, Shyam, met a family of Sikhs, refugees from Rawalpindi, who told them horrifying stories of Sikh victims in the riots. Later, when Manto asked his friend if he felt hostile towards him after listening to the story of Muslim atrocities, Shyam said, “Not now … but when I was listening to the atrocities the Muslims had committed … I could have murdered you.” Manto reflects: “I was deeply shocked by Shyam’s words. Perhaps I could have also murdered him at the time. But later when I thought about it – and between then and now there is a world of difference – I suddenly understood the basis of those riots in which thousands of innocent Hindus and Muslims were killed every day.” [Emphasis mine]
Manto understood the psychological basis of communal violence. There is a visible abyss between “then” and “now”. A feverish transformation takes place in the body, as it passes from a murderous state to a state of calmness. Manto realised the politics of hate as the politics of heat. The state of communal hatred is a state of heat. This heat is corporeal. Hatred is an emotion that is meant to stir your blood and raise your temperature.
Here, it is important to distinguish between those who carry out the agenda of hatred and commit hate crimes and those who are behind the scenes. The manufacturers of hate, the men who plan genocides and mass violence, are cold-blooded. They indoctrinate the executors and generate enough heat in them to carry out the mission. Communal violence creates an atmosphere where ordinary people who are not part of the mob are infused with hateful anger when they come to hear the gruesome stories. That is how Manto and Shyam were momentarily consumed by communal passion. In such situations, the heat takes on viral proportions.
Another important distinction needs to be made. Hatred is more of an emotion than a feeling. Emotion is an inwardly directed state of subjective intensity, acutely self-consuming, constrained by self-serving considerations, to give a literary expression, pulled by self-ward winds. Feelings, in contrast, are an outwardly directed state of subjective intensity, expansive and loose, unlike emotions, moved by other-centric affectations. I am not situating emotions or feelings in any specific place (self or other, inside or outside), but rather describing their direction.
Excerpted with permission from Gandhi: The End of Non-Violence, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee, Penguin India.
