Gauri Viswanathan
Writing on the
contested histories of Ayodhya and Somnath, Peter Van der Veer refers to the
inimical relations between Hindus and Muslims as "one of the most
important master-narratives of colonial orientalism in India."[1]
Van der Veer argues that the manner in which Hindu-Muslim relations were
construed in British historiography was crucial to legitimating the validity of
British rule as one of enlightened disinterestedness. It is also clear,
however, that the "facts" marshalled by British commentators are
central to the description of Hindu-Muslim relations. The destruction of Hindu
temples by Muslim rulers and the forcible conversion of Hindus at sword-point
represent one type of fact that underwrites a master-narrative of violent
change, as recorded, for example, in James Mill's work, The History of
British India (1817). In opposition is another kind of fact, also
documented in British historiography in works such as Thomas W. Arnold's The
Preaching of Islam (1896): the patronage of Hindu shrines by Muslim saints
and Muslim tomb-worship by Hindus; the sharing of titles and names, as well as certain
social practices and customs, by both Hindus and Muslims, and so forth. If both
"facts" are equally accurate descriptions of Hindu-Muslim relations,
then tolerance and intolerance can be defined as the respective absence or
presence of violence and forcible change from outside.
But by the last
quarter of the nineteenth century, when the first British census reports were
commissioned to establish the causes of Muslim expansion in India, the official
sociology of India no longer depicted religious change through outside
intervention as the central issue: Islamic conversion was represented as having
less to do with either the coercive or the charismatic character of Islam than
with economic necessity or social ostracism from Hinduism. What models of tolerance
or intolerance are then suggested by this reading of Muslim expansion, in which
conversion to Islam is the result neither of a gradual mystical insight that
incorporates aspects of Hindu worship nor a violent rupture of existing
beliefs, but rather of the exclusionary character of caste Hinduism? Indeed, in
this description the agency of intolerant action would seem to have shifted
from Islam to Hinduism, which, by casting out its members, enables Islam to
offer the possibilities for social betterment to these excluded groups. But the
meanings of exclusion and incorporation are as volatile as that of tolerance
and intolerance, for the conversion to Islam precipitated by lower-caste status
in Hinduism also gives rise to movements of reconversion to Hinduism.
These attempt to reverse the principle of exclusion and challenge the appeal of
rival religious systems by re-absorbing those who had earlier been cast off or
had not been fully assimilated. Yet, belying their incorporative philosophy and
reformist tendencies, reconversion movements such as the Arya Samaj exhibit a
morbid defensiveness that finds expression in group solidarity and an enforced
collective identity. Indeed, the point of the reformist discourse of these
movements is that, in redefining the boundaries of the Hindu community,
reconversion is incorporated into the discourse of Hindu nationalism.
Posing similar
questions about incorporation and exclusion (albeit in a different context) in
a provocative essay on Tamil art, Vidya Dehejia points to the appropriation of
Vaishnavite features in Shaivite art as possible evidence of sectarian tension.[2]
Dehejia contests the assumption that wherever there is rivalry or contention
between two religious communities, one should expect to find not appropriation
or borrowing of features of the rival religious system, but its total
destruction, and that the establishment of a separate identity normally
requires negation of the competing system. Dehejia's argument raises
fundamental questions about whether tolerance can be assumed to be equivalent
to syncretism, and intolerance to absolutism and exclusivity.[3]
How, for example, do we respond to reconversion movements which attempt to
include, in a broadly reformist way, groups that had been formerly excluded?
Does the gesture of reclamation and incorporation efface the earlier one of
marginalization? Suppose the groups being courted do not want to return to the
fold -- are they denying their true origins and willfully affiliating
themselves with a community with which they are united not by belief but by
social circumstance?
With this
discussion of the complex meanings of appropriation and exclusion in mind, my
intent in this essay is to locate the point in British discourse where the
"facts" of forcible and violent change, as presented in works like
Mill's History of British India (1817), and the "facts" of
peaceful assimilation to Islam, as presented in Arnold's The Preaching of
Islam (1896), are no longer clearly demarcated as self-evident examples of
Islamic intolerance in the first instance and tolerance in the second -- where,
in short, incorporation and exclusion resist being unproblematically located in
ideas of religious syncretism and religious absolutism, respectively.
The point in
British discourse at which narratives of tolerance and intolerance acquire a
shifting center of reference -- at times it is Islam and at other times
Hinduism -- is determined, as I suggested above, by the writing of India's
official sociology in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the
first census reports, settlement reports, and district gazetteers were
commissioned. The enumeration of India's populations marks the period when the
boundaries of religious communities are redrawn in relation to empirically
derived explanations about the expansion of the Muslim population in nineteenth-century
India. While Muslim groups are identified as separate from the Hindu community
and therefore also a separate political entity, a large majority of Muslims are
also recognized for the first time in British discourse, as Peter Hardy notes, as
originally having been Hindus who had converted for reasons other than direct
force or spiritual illumination.[4]
For the first time, the discourse of nationalism is processed through a
discourse of origins. For instance, questions confronting British
administrators included deciding how the numbers of Muslims in India were to be
categorized -- as descendants of those who originally came from Arab lands and
were subsequently indigenized (i.e., "hereditary" Muslims), or as
descendants of native Hindus who had converted. Were Hindus who had converted
to Islam to be considered less Muslim (i.e., more Hindu) than other Muslims of
Arab-descent groups?
I want to approach
these questions of origins through that institutional instrument most directly
focused on the determination of identity -- census-taking -- and, in
particular, census-taking as an established feature of British colonial
administration. The census reports on India issued between 1872 and 1901 made
the first systematic attempt to categorize the religious identities of Indian
peoples (including converts) according to criteria of racial origin, customs,
and laws. In the course of such categorization, various oppositions were
constructed out of the material of enumeration -- oppositions such as
foreign/indigenous, national/local, pure/hybrid, lineal descent (or
hereditary)/convert. In assessing the strength of the Muslim population in
India between 1872 and 1901, the census threw the bulk of its weight on the
side of the second term in each of these oppositions to draw a picture of the
Indian Muslim, not as an autonomous "other" but as a version of the
Hindu at an earlier historical moment before the advent of Arab, Afghan, and
Turkish groups -- and before possibly forcible conversion of Hindus to Islam.[5]
The "contrived" assimilation of Muslim Indians to Hindu India is
not simply a nineteenth-century Indian nationalist strategy of fighting
colonial oppression, as it is portrayed by recent Hindu revivalists, but a
feature of late nineteenth-century British discourse itself. Indeed, the
British assertion of the local origins of Indian Muslims challenged the
separatist impulse among Muslims as a claim that was belied by the
"facts" accumulated by British ethnographic data, census reports, and
commissioned surveys -- facts which placed the Muslims closer in racial
features, behavior, habits, and customs to other native inhabitants of India,
including Hindus. The "Muslim" represented in the British census
reports is marked by an ambivalent identity -- neither truly Muslim nor truly
Hindu, riven by social class differences that, in their turn, displace the
possibilities of a unity of religious belief or identity. The critical issue in
the historiography of Hindu-Muslim relations is not so much that British policy
conceived of Hindus and Muslims as separate communities, but that the theory of
common origins -- from which other social and religious identities were
willingly or forcibly adopted -- produced a crippling situation that disallowed
either total unity of Hindus and Muslims or total division between them.
I should point
out that I am not reading these reports to suggest a continuity between British
colonial discourse and the rhetoric of modern communalism, or to argue that the
roots of contemporary communal problems lie in late nineteenth-century
techniques of information gathering. Rather, what I would like to argue is that
acts of classification, such as the census, establish the categories of
knowledge about the racial and religious composition of the people it
enumerates that enter the domain of memory for the colonized -- a fluid and
shadowy realm of meaning that acquires a suggestive power and resonance in the
construction of future relationships between India's ethnic and religious
groups. The shift from elite to mass politics in Indian nationalism gave a new
importance to the masses of Muslim converts who were denied an origin outside
India. As a descriptive catalog of India's ethnic composition, the British
census establishes fixities of racial and religious categories, even as it
insinuates the possibilities of overlapping and common origins rather than real
historical difference. The function of the census to introduce categories of
difference and then deny them must be seen to have a complex effect on the
structure of perceptions in Hindu-Muslim relations, if not on those relations
themselves. My interest lies in examining the mediating role of British
ethnography in the production of a field of remembered identities, both Hindu
and Muslim, that feeds into the discourses of religious nationalism.
census-takers and the origins of muslims
The first
systematic assessment of India's Muslim population was made in the British
census reports of 1872. H. Beverly, the superintendent of the census, made the
potentially explosive assertion that the large presence of Muslims in Bengal
was due not so much to the introduction of foreign blood into the country but
to the conversion of the former inhabitants, for whom a rigid system of caste
discipline made Hinduism intolerable.[6]
Many Bengali Muslims took exception to this conclusion, and Khondkar Fazli Rabi
wrote The Origins of the Musalmans of Bengal (1895) to prove that the
truth was indeed quite the opposite: he was at pains to point out, for example,
that many leading Muslim families could trace their origins to foreign roots --
families such as the Saiads, who refrained from intermarriage with families of
more "dubious" ancestry. Piqued by what he took to be Beverly's social
condescension, Rabi wrote,
It can safely, and without any fear of
contradiction, be asserted that the ancestors of the present Musalmans of this
country were certainly those Musalmans who came here from foreign parts during
the rule of the former sovereigns, and that the present generation of Musalmans
are the offspring of that dominant race who remained masters of the land for
562 years.[7]
Other Muslim
historians, however, were less extreme in their claims, and though committed to
the theory of the foreign origin of Indian Muslims, they reluctantly admitted
that local converts dominated the total. At the same time the figures quoted
were generally conservative. Abu A. Ghaznavi, who was asked by the British to
respond to Fazli Rabi's claim, calculated that roughly twenty percent of the
Muslims living in Bengal were lineal descendants of foreign settlers, fifty
percent had a mixture of foreign blood, and the remaining thirty percent, he
claimed, were probably descended from Hindus and other converts.[8]
The 1901 Census,
however, dismissed these figures as too disproportionate and placed the
percentage of converts from Hinduism much higher. The idea of the original
"Hindu-ness" of Muslim inhabitants extended to the argument that the
early Muslim invaders in Bengal were not even Arabs but Pathans. Yet the fact
recorded in the census is that the Muslims who called themselves
"Shekh" outnumbered those who professed to be Pathans in a ratio of
fifty to one, and furthermore, that many of these "Shekhs" had only
recently begun to claim this name and were formerly known as Ashraf in south
Bengal and as Nasya in north Bengal.[9]
Two different commentaries are thus juxtaposed in a contained narrative of
conflicting memories: the descriptive record of Muslim self-definitions as
Arab-descended is framed by a commentary that negates those self-perceptions
and posits an alternative explanation of Muslim origins in the fractured space
of Hindu communities.
Explanation
became even more racialized through the ethnographic contributions of Herbert
Risley, who was brought into the census-taking operations at a crucial stage of
description. The ethnographic scale of measurement, or "Cephalic
index," that he devised conclusively "proved" the Hindu origins
of Indian Muslims, despite the latter's claims to foreign ancestry that their
names and titles presumably asserted. By taking measurements of the proportion
of the breadth of the head to its length, as well as of the breadth of the nose
to its length, Risley placed Muslims closer in racial features to the lower
castes of Chandals and Pods than to Semitic peoples.[10]
Here is a clear instance of how the discourse of class, blending
indistinguishably with the discourse of race, appropriated the category of
religion as uniting both discourses; it became possible to state that
"although the followers of the Koran form the largest proportion of the
inhabitants [of Rangpur district], there is little reason to suppose that many
of them are intruders. They seem in general, from their countenances, to
be descendants of the original inhabitants."[11]
The split between "original" Muslims, defined as those who comprised
the higher classes, and local Muslim converts from Hinduism, who were
consistently identified with the lower classes, did two things: first, it
accentuated differences not so much between Hindus and Muslims but between
Muslims and Muslims on the point of foreign or native descent, with Muslims
converted from Hinduism being regarded more ambiguously as Muslim and more
relationally placed vis-a-vis Hindus; secondly, the dichotomy of foreign versus
locally descended Muslims replaced a unity of Muslim identity -- which the
profession of Islam presumably implied -- with categories of differences based
on social class. Both factors figure importantly in the reconversion movements
led by Hindu groups as early as the nineteenth century, and which continue to
function today in certain regions of India (especially in those areas where
mass conversions have taken place, such as in Meenakshipuram).
The reconversion
movements (which often include rituals of purification, or shuddhi) are
a relatively unique phenomenon in that they seek to reverse the total
excommunication from Hinduism that apostasy to any other religion generally
demanded. Furthermore, reconversion is premised on the activation of remembered
identities long since lost or abandoned. The readmission into Hinduism of
converts to Islam required, often as a test, that they display types of
behavior that no Muslim would ever be identified with, such as eating pork.
(Many Muslims who had converted from Hinduism had still not adopted the taboo
against pork-eating. For such converts, it was thus possible to exhibit those
behaviors that made them acceptable to caste Hindus[12].)
Most important, the emphasis in reconversion rituals on practices, habits, and
usages as markers of religious identity bears a strong resemblance to a similar
emphasis in the British census reports that gave greater weight to customs and
practices over the self-declarations of religious identity as a means of
classifying religious groups in India. If apostates could be reclaimed back
into the fold despite their earlier rejection of Hinduism in favor of another
religion, such reclamation was made possible by a political discourse of
religious identity whereby a Hindu remained a Hindu by virtue of retaining
certain social customs. What the census report does, in other words, is
establish a set of scientifically derived representations that enables the
Hindu community to claim Muslims among its own by virtue of criteria drawn from
racial categories suggesting cultural continuity.
In its
preoccupation with the question of Muslim origins, the census revealed its own
bias toward downplaying the foreign element in the composition of Indian
Muslims, only one sixth of whom were placed as Arab- or Pathan-descended
Muslims. The rest were listed as local converts from Hinduism who still
preserved habits and usages from the religion they had supposedly repudiated.
The census report consistently accentuates the "Hindu-ness" of Muslim
converts in proportion to minimizing the self-definitions of those whom it
sought to enumerate, the census-taker often assuming the prerogative of listing
them under the group to which he thought they belonged, even though
extensive inquiry was adopted as a means of eliciting more detailed information
from Muslims and other religious groups on where they placed themselves. In
almost every category -- age, religion, caste, marital status, and so forth --
questions generated a bewildering range of responses that often led the
census-taker to make the determination himself. An infuriating inexactitude of
response emerges as one of the central frustrations of census-taking (for age,
many inhabitants of Indian villages were known to respond with a blithe bis-chalis"
[twenty or forty]), and such vagueness encouraged the census-takers to transfer
the authority for self-classification from the subject to themselves. On the
matter of religious classification, the census-takers had clear instructions
that they were to accept each person's statement about their religious
affiliation, no matter how vague or imprecise it might be, but in practice this
rule was systematically overlooked. Instead, the census-takers took it upon
themselves to decide whether an individual was Hindu or Muslim, which in
practical terms often meant determining whether a Muslim could trace his roots
to foreign ancestors or whether he was descended from local converts from
Hinduism. Often such determinations were based on a combination of the customs,
usages, and practices followed by the individual and his racial features,
rather than personal declaration of religious identity or religious belief, the
latter being routinely effaced in the final classification. (This was also
true, incidentally, with regard to Christian converts who were often judged as
Hindus, not as Christians, in cases they filed in the British Indian courts for
restitution of rights they had forfeited under Hindu law, the basis for the
decision being the degree to which their behavior, habits, and manners
conformed to those of Hindus, such as preserving the joint family system.)[13]
Classification
was made even more problematic in the case of Muslims who appeared to follow
Hindu customs to some extent and had half-Hindu names, yet called themselves by
an upper-class Muslim title. Some were formerly high-caste Hindus who, on
conversion to Islam, were allowed to assume upper-class Muslim titles such as
"Shekh" even though they continued to adhere in part to Hindu customs
and, in a few rare cases, even to intermarry with those Muslims who were of
foreign descent. On the contrary, the lower castes, who were often converts,
had to be content with the title "Nau-Muslim," or "New
Muslim." It was only in the case of converts who came from functional
groups that Hindu names and titles were still retained, such as Kali Shekh,
Kalachand Shekh, etc. As a Muslim convert of low social position rose in
station, he was likely to assume more high-sounding designations that combined
both Hindu and Muslim names. For instance, almost in a crude sort of parody, the
gradual upgrading of a low-caste convert like Meher Chand is seen in the
progressive combination of names and titles that he acquired through conversion
to Islam: Meher Ullah, Meheruddin, Meheruddin Muhammad, Munshi Muhammed
Meheruddin, Munshi Muhammed Meheruddin Ahmad, and finally Maulavi Munshi
Muhammed Meheruddin Ahmad.
Perhaps the most
damaging assessment made by the census report, at least in terms of the
repercussions that it had on future constructions of Muslims as
"outsiders," was that while the majority of Indian Muslims were
identified as local converts or descendants of converts from Hinduism, the
conclusion established by the British census-takers was that Indian Muslims saw
themselves as "other"-defined, their point of reference for personal
identity lying outside India in a quasi pan-Islamic unity:
All Mohammedans look on Arabic as their sacred
language and they interlard their conversation with any Persian or Arabic words
they can pick up from their Mullahs or from their religious books. The grammar
remains Bengali and it is only some of the vocables which are changed. The
better educated converts often deliberately abandon their native language. The
Garpeda Bhunjas of Balasore furnish an illustration of this. They are descended
from a Brahman and the females are still so far imbued with Hindu prejudices
that they abstain from beef. But they have completely given up the use of Oriya
and now speak Hindustani even in the family circle.[14]
In this accent
on the practice of "difference" by those who were indeed drawn away
from Hinduism at one point in their history, the British census gave Hindu
nationalists of a later generation a language of foreignness and otherness to
describe Muslims who had no proper claims to a unique foreign identity, and who
yet were said to have made such claims in a gesture of denial of their (in many
cases) Hindu origins.
In other words,
the British census produced a complex construction of Muslim religious and
ethnic identity playing on both the assertion and the denial of difference. The
very function of the census was to show, through enumeration, that the
assertion of "difference" -- the idea of Muslims as outsiders -- was
propagated by Indian Muslims themselves. Once this was established as a
specifically Muslim claim, that declaration of difference was promptly denied
by the categories adopted in British census-taking, which sought to demonstrate
that the bulk of the Muslim population came from local converts. While Indian
Muslims were anxious to link their ancestry to Arab roots, British commentators
seemed bent on proving their mixed heritage -- that the majority of Muslims in
India at the time of the first major census in 1872 were indeed converts and
not descendants of Arab settlers and conquerors.
romance or coercion: ethnographic plots
One of the most
fascinating sections of the 1901 census is an appendix that lists individual
cases of conversion in various districts of east and north Bengal. In this
listing, the cause of the vast majority of conversions is established as
neither proselytism nor doctrinal conviction, but romance. The elaborate
narrative sketch that follows each case reads like a romantic novel in its
stress on Hindus converting to Islam primarily to marry men or women with whom
they had fallen in love.[15]
As in any romance novel worth its name, each story is carefully annotated with
the names of principal characters, central episodes, conflict, and climactic
resolution.
The comparison
with the romantic novel stops at the point of narrative structure, however.
Though romance is presented as the main motive for conversion, the play of
human desires and feelings has no place here. The enumerated instances of mixed
marriages, in which marital union between Hindus and Muslims is achieved only
with the conversion of one partner to the religion of the other, become
examples of exile, excommunication, and existential isolation. The potential
function of interracial love and marriage to offer a model of cultural
syncretism -- as a counterpoint to the homogeneity of a politically determined
religious culture -- is less emphatic in the British account than the
irreversible loss of community, which results from romantic attachments that
impel individuals to convert in a final act of desperation. Though twenty-one
of the forty reported cases list romance as the motive for conversion, the
inner details of each case suggest that caste is the main player, not love: it
is not the impulse of love that drives Hindus to embrace the religion of their
Muslim spouses, but the fact that they lose membership in their former community
as a result of their romantic attachments. In other words, the real cause for
conversion still continues to be a condition that is built into Hinduism -- its
ability to render caste members as outcastes through mere association with
non-Hindus, mainly by having romantic intrigues with them, but also by sharing
food with them or coming under their care during illness (the two other primary
causes of conversion to Islam listed in the appendix). Only six of the forty
cases listed suggest that doctrinal inclination -- the inherent appeal of Islam
-- had anything to do with conversion. These instances add up to show the
extent to which a vast number of Hindus became Muslims not because they chose
to or in order to attain the objects of their desire, or even for reasons of
practical expediency, but because the door had been permanently shut on them by
Hinduism.
The presentation
of case histories is itself marked by an unusual reflexity and
self-consciousness. One of its most conspicuous features is the scrupulous
annotation of the religious and racial authorship of each section of the
returns as Hindu, Muslim, or British. It is to be expected that the sections
written by Muslim informants would stress that Hindus converted to Islam
voluntarily and as a result of the deep impression made by Koranic teachings,
communicated not just by preachers but by enthusiastic lovers as well. It is
also to be expected that the descriptions written by Hindus would minimize the
role of individual conviction and attribute conversion to force; by extension
they would emphasize seduction rather than love. The persistent divisions
between Hindus and Muslims on the interpretation of conversion -- Muslims
claiming that the bulk of Islamic conversions were voluntary and Hindus
claiming that they were forced -- are reproduced in the interpretations of love
and marriage between members of the two communities. Whereas the Muslim authors
stress the conventionally romantic aspects of Hindu-Muslim liaisons and the
attractions of Islamic faith as intrinsic to romantic love, the Hindu authors
of the report's various sections dismiss love as a motive existing
independently of proselytizing zeal and signifying emotional and spiritual
needs.
The sections
attributed to British authorship articulate a position that appears to work in
a space between the two positions on romance and conversion taken by Muslim and
Hindu authors, representing the two extremes of volition and coercion. But the
British position turns strategically on a stance of measured uncertainty and
ambivalence. Is "falling in love" the result of free will or
manipulated desire? That central question is raised but never answered, because
the event of "falling in love" is shifted from the category of effect
(i.e., the result of conviction, sexual passion, emotional or spiritual needs,
desire to establish autonomy in human relationships, etc.) to that of cause
(i.e., of excommunication, civil death, and eventually conversion). The focus
again returns to the caste features of Hinduism and to the notion of an
undivided community before the disruptions wrought by mixed marriages and the
threats to a stable religious identity that such marriages pose. This movement
parallels the shift in emphasis, so apparent from the very mode of the census-taking
operations, from the individual to the community, the latter increasingly
subsuming the subjectivity of converts and reducing their actions to the
helpless reactions of those who have been shut out from a secure and
proper place in Hindu society. The conversion of Hindus to Islam in the context
of romance is represented in these reports as a result of
excommunication from Hinduism, not as willed change or the exercise of
unfettered choice whose unfortunate outcome happens to be exile and
excommunication.
origins and the right to self-governance
What are we to
make of the pattern discernible in the census reports that suggests a keen
British interest in proving the Hindu origins of the Muslim population of
India? In considering several hypotheses, we may find it profitable to examine
Peter Hardy's provocative argument that deciding whether Muslims were either
foreign settlers or local converts was vital to resolving the British debate
about whether to confer the right of self-governance on Indians. If, as Hardy
speculates, Muslims in British India were descendants of foreign settlers with
a culture foreign to India, the British could claim justification for not
treating the population they ruled as a united people capable of sustaining
self-governing institutions of a kind that required, for their successful
functioning, a modicum of shared moral values. I have shown, however, that the
census reports seemed not to favor the theory that Muslims were foreigners but
rather that they were converts from Hinduism. This suggests that a different
type of reasoning may be behind the conclusions put forth by the census
reports. Hardy does indeed consider the possibility that the presence of a
large number of voluntary converts among Muslims could have suggested to the
British political establishment an inherent instability about the Hindu
community and innate fissures within its membership, giving grounds for the
British suspicion that India could not be dealt with as a homogeneous political
community.
I would like to
advance two slightly different arguments, however. First, the emphasis on class
differences between so-called hereditary Muslims and Muslim converts is part of
a well-documented tendency in British commentaries to explain Indian society in
terms of the caste system. Hindus converting to Islam presumably repudiated not
merely a religion or world-view but caste itself. The British, however,
interpreted the converts' imperfect assimilation into Muslim society and the
pursuit of titles and rank by low-caste converts not as a genuine desire for
upward social mobility, as more recent Muslim historians suggest,[16]
but as evidence of the continuing influence of Hindu social ideas and the
perpetuation of an invisible caste system even in the new Islamic order.[17]
Indeed, the dislike of educated Muslims for the theory that most of the local
converts in east and north Bengal were from the lower castes is doggedly read
by the British as reflecting a persistent caste mentality. That is to say, if
Indian Muslims wanted to be recognized as descendants of foreign settlers, they
must have been motivated largely by a desire to conceal their low-class Hindu
origins. Edward Gait, the census commissioner of the 1901 report, even
remarked:
The Moghals are converts, just as much as are the
Chandals [a low-caste tribe of Bengal]. It is only a question of time and
place. The Christian religion prides itself as much on converts from one race
as on those from another, and except for the influence of Hindu ideas, it is
not clear why Muslims should not do so too.[18]
We can infer
from this sort of analysis that the British determination to prove the local
origins of Indian Muslims assumes that any future political scheme for India
would have to consider -- even to the point of reproducing to some extent --
the systems of social stratification by which Indian society had come to be
defined in colonial discourse.
The second
argument I would make, however, might seem to contradict the first. At the same
time that the census reports showed a tacit recognition (and even acceptance)
of social stratification, there was also an eagerness to show the forces of
change that had been set in motion in "traditional" Hindu society, to
the point that outcastes like the Kochs of Bengal were converting to Islam
because they had a "disposition to change."[19]
That the conversions revealed the existence of a volatile and dynamic society,
constantly in flux, appeared to confirm some of the positive consequences of
outside intervention, be it by the Mughals or the British. Thus the almost
inordinate British preoccupation with proving that the large majority of
Muslims in Bengal were originally Hindus ran parallel to the British zeal in
demonstrating the validity of catalyzing India into social and cultural change.
But the effect
of this dual, contradictory move was to further complicate the ambivalent
identity of Indian Muslims, who are represented as having both rejected (either
voluntarily or involuntarily) the religion they once professed (even several
generations removed) and retained aspects of it in their social orientation.
There are, therefore, two kinds of often conflicting memories that inhabit the
Hindu past: one, the memory of having once been an undivided community that had
been violently torn asunder by foreign invasions, depredations, and cultural
violence, of which forcible conversion is the most radical and divisive; and
two, the memory of betrayal, repudiation, and willful reaffiliation to another
community that the Muslim self-definition as "foreign-descended"
appeared to suggest to Hindus. In both cases the Indian Muslim could not
readily be identified as either outsider or insider. The sense of betrayal is
further accentuated by the mythologies surrounding forcible conversion which
were often propagated -- or so claimed the British census reports -- by Muslims
themselves. One typical story recorded in the census report tells of a time
when the Muslim population in Bengal was still scattered and it was customary
for each Muslim dweller to hang an earthen-pot [badana] from his
thatched roof as a sign of his religious affiliation. The census report
recounts a story about a learned maulvi who, after a few years' absence,
went to a Hindu village to visit a disciple dwelling there. Unable to locate
the latter's earthen-pot, he was told on inquiry that his Muslim disciple had
renounced Islam and joined a tribal group. The maulvi on his return to
the city reported this incident to the nawab, who in a fit of rage
ordered his troops to surround the village and compel every person there to
become Muslim. As part of Muslim folklore, this extravagant story is narrated
at one level as an example of Muslim assimilationist zeal and dogmatic pride.
But when retold in the context of the census report, it has the effect of
mythologizing the increase of the Muslim population in Bengal and removing
history and ideology from the construction of a hybrid Indian identity.[20]
In increasingly
alarming ways, Hindu revivalists have sought to reinscribe that history and
ideology through the reconfigurative instrument of memory and through rituals
like reconversion, which in many respects functions as the handmaiden of
memory. The whipped-up hysteria surrounding forcible conversion as one of
Muslim India's most bitter legacies is not just expressive of Hindu antagonism
to Muslims and to the history of violent rule in the past that the Muslim
presence connotes. The hysteria is also part of a well-developed, concerted
effort to remind Muslims of their original identity as Hindus, inasmuch as it
is, at the same time, a sinister reminder to them that Muslim claims to
"difference" and "otherness" are falsely founded and
therefore untenable. (The BJP's insistence on eliminating separate personal
laws for Muslims, concerning such things as marriage, divorce, and inheritance
rights, and on developing a common civil code by which Hindus and Muslims would
be governed alike derives, I think, from this reclamation of Muslims as
Hindus.) Within this extreme logic, if there is anything worse than marauding
Arab and Afghan invaders plundering Hindu temples and destroying Hindu
religious life and culture, it is the fact that those who were once Hindus and
subsequently converted (even if only because they occupied a low or outcaste
position in Hindu society) now dare to deny their "true" heritage and
make claims to a separate religious (and also political) identity.
What makes the
intolerance of Hindus invisible, especially to Hindus themselves, is a
rhetorical strategy that can be seen in the British census reports and which Hindu
nationalists have subsequently adapted for their own purposes: contrasting the
fluid, mercurial status of Muslims -- they are either foreigners or converts,
but never presented as having a direct, unmediated relationship to India --
with the fixed, essentialized status of Hindus as the original, real
inhabitants. Though the census introduces the category of "Animists"
to suggest a pre-Aryan presence in India, the incorporation of the culture of
animists to that of the early Aryans is presented as a process outside
conversion and religious expansion. While Aryan incorporation of animist
features in such things as Aryan stone-images is unchallenged as an example of
syncretic adaptation, a similar process of incorporation-as-assimilation (for
example, Hindu stone pillars used as steps in mosques) is considered a
defilement of Hindu culture by Muslim conquerors. The fact that the former is
considered an example of tolerance and the latter of intolerance has a great
deal to do with the distinctions drawn between an originary culture and a
culture described as derivative and foreign. While, as I suggested above, the
census account of the conversion of lower-caste Hindus to Islam would seem to
have shifted the agency of intolerance from Islam to Hinduism, the simultaneous
representation of Hinduism as the "original" religion of India
removes Hinduism from a history of expansion and religious conversion as active
as that of, say, Islam. To conceptualize Hindu-Muslim relations as a
relationship of native to convert (as the British census does) or native to
foreigner is to introduce notions of incorporation and exclusion that become
ideologically charged in the struggle to affirm origins. Sadly, history
vanishes, leaving only distorted memory in its place.
postscript
The BJP/VHP
forces claim that the destruction of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992, has
now made the temple-mosque controversy a non-issue. Nothing could be further
from the truth. But that is not because the demolition of the mosque had been
preceded by viable alternative ways of resolving the crisis. If there was a
strange commingling of modernist and mythic elements in the political symbolism
of the Ram movement, its very oddness would have seemed to make it open to
swift dismantling. But the reaction against Hindu revivalism has not been
particularly successful in enabling a higher level of discourse to develop, for
the counterreply either asserts an equally positivist claim (i.e., the Babri
Masjid was built on an empty plot of land, Islamic settlements pre-date Hindu
presence in Ayodhya, Islam forbids the construction of a mosque over a
"pagan" temple, and so forth), or it takes the form of postmodern
skepticism against all truth claims (i.e., there was no temple, there
was no Ram, there was no Mughal "invasion" or forcible conversions or
iconoclasm, for the history of Ayodhya, like all given histories, is subject to
doubt and can never be known).
In either case
religious belief, Hindu or Islamic, remains unplaced and unaccounted for. No
matter what the evidence might be for or against the existence of a Ram temple
before the Babri Masjid came to be built, the weight of the evidence has not
seemed to affect the authoritativeness with which belief in Ram is accepted by
Hindu devotees. Letters to the editor in various national dailies during the
period of the Ayodhya crisis suggest that the immediate priority of building
the temple had receded into the background ("Ram lives in the heart, not
in temples" is the line one encounters most often), but not so the
firmness and solidity of belief in Ram. One writer told the editor of the
Madras-based The Hindu, "I am prepared to accept the declaration of
historians that Ram probably never existed, but that will not stop my believing
in him nonetheless."[21]
If this can be taken to be a typical response, then the very debate over
Ayodhya -- the historicity of Ram, the presence of a mosque on the site of a
Hindu temple, and the instances of iconoclasm that accompanied Islamic
conversions -- is narrowly concentrated on the verification of facts that in
reality have little or nothing to do with the actual problem. That problem is
how modern Indian secularism can accommodate and absorb the reality of religion
and the power of religious conviction experienced by believers, while at the
same time protect the rights of those who believe differently.
Ashis Nandy's
contention that Indian secularism has exhausted itself and failed to offer a
potent alternative to the rising tide of violence in Indian politics and
religion has been construed by some of his critics as a reactionary,
anti-secularist argument. What I take Nandy to mean, however, is that Indian
secularism has taken the form of the very thing it opposes in principle --
religious intolerance -- and allowed for further divisions between religious
ideology and everyday practices of religious belief. If, as Nandy contends, one
of the trends in recent South Asian history is the splitting of religion into
faith and ideology -- faith defined as a way of life which is
"operationally plural and nonmonolithic"[22]
and ideology as organized religion which is identifiable with a set body of
texts -- the modern Indian state has chosen to define its secular character
more in reaction against religious ideology than in relation to
religious belief. As an example of how this tendency translates into policy,
the regulation of excesses of religious ideology that might threaten the
national interest has become an acquired function of the modern state, which is
authorized to act as the ultimate arbiter for religious disputes. The reality
of individual belief cannot be dealt with as an autonomous reality by the
machinery of state, because the secular nation recognizes only the social
component of religion -- its hierarchic structures and organizational features.
Hence, the state cannot engage with the individual; it can respond only to the
material and symbolic orderings of religion as a social institution.
Are the
possibilities of religious communication thus foreclosed in the modern secular
state, especially if part of the imported baggage of the state is an ingrained
skepticism toward personal conviction? The urgent challenge to Hindu revivalism
made by secular historians reveals the latter's own difficulties in dealing
with religion as a heterogeneous belief system irreducible to mere ideology. If
nationalism can be defined as the total set of representational practices that
establish the grounds of nationality,[23]
then terms like "cultural nationalism" or "religious
nationalism" already assume a seamless unity of aspirations, goals, and
agendas, a selection and filtering that irons out the contradictions embedded
in the processual construction of national identity from the fragments of
religious, racial, cultural, and other forms of self-identification. Peter Van
der Veer cautions us against this totalizing approach and urges that "we
should take religious discourse and practice as constitutive of changing social
identities, rather than treating them as ideological smoke screens that hide
the real clash of material interests and social classes."[24]
However forcefully allegories of the nation, constituting the history of modern
secularism, might draw attention to the teleology of its own formation (and by
this I refer specifically to the triumphalist rhetoric of rights and
citizenship on the model of liberal principle), the narratives produced in the
crucial space of negotiation between national and religious identity yield the
most visible light on the strains and stresses in community
self-identification, especially when community or individual self-perceptions
conflict with the definitions accorded them by the nation-state.
Perhaps, as
David Krieger suggests in a recent essay,[25]
if ideology and faith as polarized terms are replaced by a notion of
"cultural metanarratives" at work in non-monolithic, pluralistic
societies, it would be easier to conceptualize -- and revitalize --
possibilities for the attainment of a pragmatics of discourse where the meaning
rather than the validity of truth claims is foregrounded -- in other words, a
discourse that presses to the very limits the contestations of religious
ideology, to the point where it can be broken down to illuminate areas of
personal belief. In Krieger's conceptualization of the problem of
communication, every form of knowing can be construed at a level of discourse
higher than argumentation, or what he calls the level of a discourse of limits.
Such a discourse accepts the possibility of unknowability and preserves an
agonistic concept of "truth" in a pluralistic context, "where
discontinuity upon the level of limit-discourse is an inescapable fact."[26]
An instance of such discontinuity is the shading of ideology into faith, which
is effected by what Krieger calls a "methodological conversion."
Krieger draws heavily on religious conversion as a metaphor for a theory of
knowledge to suggest the conceptual means by which the gaps between different
cultural metanarratives might be bridged. The cognitive rejection of one
narrative through the conative acceptance of another is a conceptual analogue
to the displacement of religious ideology by faith. "Such a conception is
necessary," Krieger writes, "to deal with the problem of how global
thinking -- the general validity of knowledge, the universality of norms and a
more than merely local solidarity with fellow humans and with nature -- is
possible in a radically pluralistic world and a postmodern context."[27]
Strictly at the
level of argumentation, an impasse can be overcome only when the ideological
premises of the parties to a dispute happen to be similar. If they are not,
even the same sets of facts, including those which are entirely
non-controversial, can yield totally different conclusions, as is all too
apparent in the Ayodhya debate where Hindu and Muslim activists derived
completely contrary conclusions from virtually the same evidence. That these
facts have a different meaning within the different paradigms involved in the
dispute -- mythological and historical -- is further complicated by the absence
of a metalanguage to negotiate the conflicting paradigms. The only form of negotiation
that is possible is one that entails a transition, or a conversion, from
one paradigm to another. Indeed, the process of transition between worldviews
emerges, in contexts of pluralism, as the only credible form of negotiation. If
discourse beyond the level of argumentation is to materialize, it cannot be
grounded in a unitary worldview or religion, but rather in the ability to move between
worldviews.
If a higher
level of discourse is to be made possible, certain pragmatic conditions for
communication would necessarily have to be in place. For one thing, the clash
of metanarratives cannot be resolved in terms of the pursuit of knowledge,
which is how it had been approached in the Ayodhya debate right up until the
time of the mosque's destruction. "True" knowledge is conferred an
authority that is belied by the resulting intransigence of both parties in the
dispute. The search for knowledge is unavoidably bound up with a struggle for
social and political power. For Muslim believers and secular Indians alike, the
general fear of losing power to Hindu revivalists had certainly raised the
stakes for "proving" the nonexistence of a Hindu temple at the mosque
site, to the point that unraveling the truth about Ayodhya had become
tantamount to a struggle for hegemonic dominance.
At the end of a
provocative and learned essay on perceptions of Islamic conversions by vastly
different groups in South Asia -- medieval historians (both Hindu and Muslim),
European commentators, and modern scholars -- Peter Hardy speculates:
whether the hypotheses of modern commentators and
scholars are themselves essays in conversion, albeit not wholly conscious or
deliberate ones: the conversion of agents of the East India Company or of the
Crown to particular conceptions of their interests and their duties in India;
the conversion of South Asian Muslims to particular conceptions of their future
relationships with each other and with non-Muslims; or, to look into an area of
inquiry not here entered, namely that of Hindus' interpretations of conversion
to Islam, the conversion of Hindus to particular conceptions of their future
relationships with Muslims.[28]
The power of
conversion as an epistemological concept is that it reclaims religious belief
from the realm of intuitive (non-rational) action to the realm of conscious
knowing and relational activity. What I hope will emerge in future discussions,
even if tentatively, is an examination of that unexplored area pointed to by
Hardy -- not just Hindu interpretations of Islamic conversion, but more
importantly, the reorientation (or conversion) of Hindus to ways of
relating with the Muslim community in India. Conceived in these relational terms,
conversion is defined not as a renunciation of an aspect of oneself (as it is
in the personal or confessional narrative form), but as an intersubjective,
transitional, and transactional mode of negotiation between two otherwise
irreconcilable worldviews.[29]
Notes
1. Peter Van der Veer, "Ayodhya and
Somnath: Eternal Shrines, Contested Histories," Social Research
59.1 (Spring 1992): 96.
2. Vidya Dehejia, "Shaivite and
Vaishnavite Art: Pointers to Sectarian Tensions?" Unpubl. paper.
3. On this point, Peter Van Der Veer's
anthropological fieldwork in Surat offers illuminating insights: he argues, for
instance, that the discourse of tolerance and communal harmony is related to
the eclipse of the themes of Hindu participation and the influence of Hinduism
from the debate about Sufi ritual. See Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism:
Hindus and Muslims in India (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994) 33-43.
4. Peter Hardy, "Modern European and
Muslim Explanations of Conversion to Islam in South Asia: A Preliminary Survey
of the Literature," Conversion to Islam, ed. Nehemia Levtzion (New
York: Holmes, 1979).
5. The question of what produced changes in
the strength of any religion was settled by reference to three causes: the
reproductive power of a religion's adherents, migration, and conversion. By the
1890s Muslims had grown twice as rapidly as Hindus, and the census asks the question:
"How far is this due to the conversion of Hindus and how far to the
greater fecundity of Muslims?" (E. Gait, The Lower Provinces of Bengal
and Their Feudatories, Census of India 1901, 6.1, Report [Calcutta, 1902]
156. Henceforth abbr. Census of India, 1901.)
6. H. Beverley, Report of the Census of
Bengal, 1872 (Calcutta, 1872), pars. 348-354. E.g.: "The real
explanation of the immense preponderance of the Musalman religious element in
this portion of the delta is to be found in the conversion to Islam of the
numerous low castes which occupied it. . . . If further proof were wanted of
the position that the Musalmans of the Bengal delta owe their origin to
conversion rather than to the introduction of foreign blood, it seems to be
afforded in the close resemblance between them and their fellow-countrymen who
were still from the low castes of Hindus. That both are originally of the same
race seems sufficiently clear, not merely from their possessing identically the
same physique, but from the similarity of the manners and customs which
characterise them."
7. Khondkar Fazli Rabi, The Origins of
the Musalmans of Bengal (1895; Dacca: Soc. for Pakistan Studies, 1970) 43.
See also Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906: A Quest for Identity
(Delhi: Oxford UP, 1981) for a complex exploration of the construction of
Muslim identity. Ahmed argues that a dominant feature of the nineteenth-century
campaigns of Islamization in Bengal was the attempted rejection of virtually
all that was Bengali in the life of a Muslim as something "incompatible
with the ideas and principles of Islam"(106).
8. Census of India 1901 166.
9. Census of India 1901 166.
Rafiuddin Ahmed maintains that the Muslim community's claims to family names
and alien origins, by way of removing the stigma of their local descent,
"were helped by certain government measures like census
classification"(Ahmed 184). While it is true that the census did elicit
the names by which Muslims called themselves, this should not be taken to mean that
it accepted the foreign origins that those names connoted. On the contrary, it
often contested their authenticity, incredulously dismissing, for instance, the
number of self-proclaimed "Shekhs" as being more than twenty times
the estimated population of "Arabia" at that time.
10. H. H. Risley, The Tribes and Castes of
Bengal, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Bengal Secretariat P, 1891) 1: xxii-xxxvii.
11. Census of India 1901 167. Emphasis
added.
12. The ritual of shuddhi contributed
greatly to the increase of Hindu-Muslim antagonism. For many Muslims, the
infamous pork-test of the Shuddhi Sabha was taken as the ultimate insult to
their religious adherence. But there were many communities and individuals who
manifested dual types of behavior, and they were targeted as ripe candidates
for shuddhi. For instance, the religious status of the Malkanas, in the
western part of what was then called the United Provinces, was a confused one.
Their culture showed the influence of Islam, even to the point of using Muslim
functionaries in some of their ceremonies. At the same time they retained many
Hindu practices. However, in the census they tended to declare themselves
Muslims. Several unsuccessful attempts to reconvert them had been made between
1907 and 1910, but as J.T.F. Jordens points out, "the decisive
break-through came in 1922 when the Hindu Rajputs in their Kshatriya Upkarini
Sabha passed a resolution in support of receiving the Malkanas, and permitting
them to be reunited with the Rajput Hindu brotherhood after purification"(158).
J.T.F. Jordens, "Reconversion to Hinduism, the Shuddhi of the Arya
Samaj," Religion in South Asia, ed. Geoffrey Oddie (Delhi: Manohar,
1982).
13. This argument is elaborated elsewhere in
my "Coping with (Civil) Death: The Christian Convert's Rights of Passage
in Colonial India," After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and
Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash (Princeton: Princeton UP,
1994).
14. Census of India 1901 166.
15. App. II, "Extracts from District
Reports regarding Causes of Conversion to Muhammadism," Census of
India, 1901x-.xix.
16. Ahmed 184.
17. Cf. Census of India, 1901, which
describes Hinduism as "not so much a form of religious belief as a social
organization. . . A man's faith does not greatly matter so long as he
recognizes the supremacy of the Brahmans and observes the restrictions of the
Hindu caste system"(152). Bernard S. Cohn has powerfully shown how the
British system of objectification through census-taking hinged on caste and
religion as crucial sociological keys to understanding Indian society and
Indian people. Cohn maintains that "ideas about caste -- its origins and
functions -- played much the same role in shaping policy in the latter half of
the nineteenth century that ideas about the village community and the nature of
property played in the first half of the nineteenth century"(243). In the
hands of an ethnographer like Herbert Risley, who wielded anthropometric
instruments as if they were weapons of war, the caste system fed into theories
of racial purity and social hierarchy. See Bernard Cohn, "The Census,
Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia," An Anthropologist
among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1987).
18. Census of India, 1901 172.
19. Census of India, 1901 166.
20. While S.A.A. Rizvi states that Muslim
commentators usually give an "altogether exaggerated account of
proselytisation," claiming pride in Islam for winning scores of Hindu
followers (17), Peter Hardy suggests a more ambivalent reading. Hardy proposes
that while it is true that there was a certain amount of exaggerated
self-glorification among recorders of Muslim history, Muslim historians were
less interested in showing how Islam expanded through force and chance than
through the missionary zeal of sufis and pirs. See S.A.A. Rizvi,
"Islamic Proselytisation, Seventh to Sixteenth Centuries," Religion
in South Asia, and Hardy, "Modern European."
21. "Ayodhya Temple," letter, The
Hindu, 10 Dec. 1990.
22. Ashis Nandy, "The Politics of
Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Tolerance," Mirrors of
Violence, ed. Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford UP, 1990).
23. Simon During, for instance, provides a
useful working definition of nationalism as "the battery of discursive and
representational practices which define, legitimate, or valorize a specific
nation-state or individuals as members of a nation-state." See Simon
During, "Literature -- Nationalism's Other? The Case for Revision," Nation
and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990) 138.
24. Van der Veer, Religious Nationalism
ix.
25. David J. Krieger, "Conversion: On
the Possibility of Global Thinking in an Age of Particularism," Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 58.2 (1990): 223-243. See also Alan M.
Olson, "Postmodernity and Faith," Journal of the American Academy
of Religion 58.1 (1990): 37-53. See also Michael C. Banner, The
Justification of Science and the Rationality of Religious Belief (Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1990) for an illuminating analysis of the problematic opposition
between the "rationality" of science and the
"irrationality" of religious belief and the circularity of paradigm
conflicts to which this gives rise.
26. Krieger 227.
27. Krieger 223.
28. Hardy 99.
29. In their challenge to conceptions of
conversion as forcible and radical change, recent advances in the scholarship
stress the relational features of conversion, though not always critically or
with a view to examining the grounds of relationality. An historiography based
on notions of transition rather than change is interested in recovering a
pragmatics of intersubjective communication. The work of scholars like Robin
Horton, Susan Bayley, Derryck Shreuder, and Geoff Oddie has aimed to supplant
the contestational features of conversion with a version that stresses its
adaptive tendencies. For instance, in her work on Muslims and Christians in
South Indian society, Saints, Goddesses and Kings (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1989), Susan Bayley challenges as misleading the view that conversion is a
radical movement from one religion to another, resulting in the total
repudiation of one for the other. Rather, she emphasizes the fluidity of the
original religion which allowed for the "conversion" of its
individuals to other religions. Bayley, echoing Robin Horton, contends that
conversion is not as transgressive or disruptive of the norms of a society as
generally maintained. Applying Horton's theories of African conversion to the
Indian context, Bayley argues that conversion is not simply a shift of
individual conviction or communal affiliation: if Indians have embraced another
religion, it is less so because they believed in some egalitarian message that
the new religion had to offer, but because they invested in an alien religious
being new divine power associated with the old. See Robin Horton, "African
Conversion," Africa: Journal of the International African Institute
41.2 (1971): 85-108; and Deryck Shreuder and Geoffrey Oddie, "What is
'Conversion'? History, Christianity and Religious Change in Colonial Africa and
South Asia," Journal of Religious History 15.4 (1989): 496-518.