Caste Politics and Partition in South Asian History

Caste Politics and Partition in South Asian History

Dwaipayan Sen*The University of Chicago

Abstract

Over approximately the last fifteen years, historians have increasingly sought to examine the effectsand implications of Partition – the event that culminated in the formation of India and Pakistan in1947 – for caste politics and the experience of caste. Along with the growth of scholarly attentionto this question, historical debate has emerged about how most accurately to characterize theseeffects. This article surveys this body of research by charting the gradual emergence of differinginterpretations on the entanglements of Partition, the transfer of power, and caste politics andexperience in Bengal, Punjab, the United Provinces and India, more generally. It argues thatwhereas scholars have produced conflicting accounts, only further research and reflection on thewider significance of this intersection will lead to the emergence of a clearer picture about howcaste politics were transformed over the cusp of Partition and the immediate context of the transi-tion from colonial to postcolonial rule in South Asia.

Introduction

While Partition and caste politics constitute two long-established sub-fields withinSouth Asian history, it is only relatively recently that scholars have increasingly turned,even if in some cases but tangentially, to grapple with problems arising from attemptsto think the two together. This is not surprising, given the arguably unobjectionableimpression that Partition – the division of British India into India and Pakistan in1947 – turned on the axis of political conflict between religious communities and theirrepresentatives. The difficulty arises, however, when one turns to consider the castequestion in its entanglement with this historical moment. Simply put, how do Dalitsfit into this story if the key actors in Partition are taken to be Hindus, Muslims, orSikhs? Given the recentness of scholars’ attention to such questions, the historiographyon caste politics and Partition as it currently stands is uneven both regionally and tem-porally, even as it continues to grow. Yet it is possible to discern the gradual emer-gence of a defining problematic which might be rendered as follows: If Partition andthe concomitant transfer of power is largely comprehended as the consequence of thecontending forces of late imperial rule on the one hand, and Hindu and Muslim (andcorrespondingly) Indian and Pakistani nationalisms on the other, how might oneaccount for the experience of political subjects who fall outside the constitutivelycommunal terms that govern this understanding? In short, how did Dalits respond toPartition?

As Urvashi Butalia, one of the first scholars to call attention to this elision put it:

In its almost exclusive focus on Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims, Partition history has worked torender many others invisible. One such history is that of the scheduled castes, or untouchables.Harijans, Dalits, untouchables, by whatever names you call the protagonists of this history, haveremained, in a sense, virtually untouchable even in the writing of this history.1

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Butalia came to this realization through her own gradual unlearning of Partition ‘only interms of religious identities’, and her move, in the 1980s to consider women’s experiencesof that event.2 She thus asked, ‘Was there then a history of Harijans too at Partition?’3

My purpose in this review article is to explore this problem of Partition’s historythrough a select survey and stitching together of relevant historical research. The articledevelops chronologically, thematically, and regionally, and attempts a synthetic view. Thehistoriography on caste politics and Partition clearly demonstrates distinct transformationsin such mobilizations in the buildup to and aftermaths of Partition. Importantly, however,scholars have offered differing accounts of this history. A fundamental assessment for howand why such changes occurred – and, what they meant – thus remains an ongoingproject, and will hopefully provoke further interest in the subject.

Towards Partition

BENGAL

Joya Chatterji’s landmark study Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947 was one of the first efforts to address the question of caste in relation to Partitionand its causes. Although the burden of her analysis lay in revealing Bengali Hindus’unequivocal investment in seeing their province partitioned, (thereby dispelling the spuri-ous notion that Partition was the sole and direct consequence of ‘the Muslim break-away’), she also provided substantial evidence, as part of her larger project, of howBengali Hindu caste-elites grew increasingly concerned to reach out and accommodatethe desires of their alleged social inferiors.4 These efforts manifested themselves in projectsof constructing ‘Hindu unity’ against the putative Muslim other from at least the 1920sonwards. The Hindu Sabha movement, which responded to fears of the ‘dying Hindu’ inface of Muslim and Christian proselytizing amongst lower-caste Hindu and tribal commu-nities, took the lead in this matter by organizing campaigns for the removal of untouch-ability, shuddhi (purification), and sangathan (community organization). Both nationally,and in Bengal, the Hindu Mahasabha joined the fray, organizing a spate of activitiesdesigned to consolidate and unify the various castes within the Hindu community. Yet,as Chatterji rightly suggested, the attempt to build a united Hindu community was farfrom an unproblematic proposition:

… the caste consolidation campaign of the thirties and forties did not entail a change of heartabout caste by the twice-born. The philosophy of the movement apparently inverted 19th cen-tury Hindu nationalist thought, which defended the caste system and preached strict obedienceto caste rules. But in fact a radical critique of the caste system formed no part of the programmeand ideology of the Hindu Sabhas.5

Despite, or perhaps because of her skepticism, some of Chatterji’s observations comingdirectly before the quotation above can be puzzling. At points she conveyed the impres-sion that those communities predominantly the object of caste-elites’ newly-found good-will, were largely responsive to such outreach: ‘There is not much evidence to suggestthat the Scheduled Castes resisted this drive to bundle them into the ‘Hindu commu-nity’’.6 And later, ‘… more usually the lower castes, particularly those that were alreadydemanding the recognition of a purer status, gratefully accepted the ‘Hindu’ identitywhich was being offered to them’.7 It is likely such dissonance led Subho Basu in hisreview of Bengal Divided to remark, ‘… we may feel that Chatterji overemphasizes thebhadrolok strategy of mobilization of lower castes. While this view analyzes bhadrolok

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motives correctly, it does not take into account the lower castes’ perception of theirparticipation in bhadrolok-sponsored agitation’.8

The question of the nature of relations between the upper and lower castes in mid-20thcentury Bengal is thus a particularly vexed one. All the more so as Chatterji seems to sug-gest that Hindu nationalists’ efforts at shuddhi and sangathan paid dividends in terms of theScheduled Castes’ identification with the larger ‘Hindu community’ in the 1946 elections,‘when the Bengal Congress won overwhelmingly in all but three of the thirty ScheduledCaste seats, a striking improvement on its performance in 1936’.9 As I will indicate furtheron however, historians have raised questions about whether the results of the 1946 elec-tions serve as an accurate index of the Scheduled Castes’ political preferences.

Sekhar Bandyopadhyay’s Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras ofBengal, 1872–47, which was principally a study of the Namasudra caste movement, elab-orated on and resonated with themes explored in Chatterji’s work. Arguably the mostremarkable finding of his research was that following a period of protracted alienationfrom Indian nationalism, Scheduled Caste leaders and their communities from the late1930s onwards ‘integrated’ into the political movements led by long-time adversaries.‘From Alienation to Integration’, therefore served as the title of the last two chapters ofhis book. Bandyopadhyay argued:

During the last decade of colonial rule, when a transfer of power became a distinct possibilityand new political alignments were to be effected, the importance of the scheduled castes, repre-senting a sizeable proportion of the non-Muslim population in Bengal, with thirty reserved seatsin the provincial legislature, became unmistakably clear to everyone. The more dominant politi-cal organisations therefore tried to appropriate the Scheduled Caste movement, the Namasudrasbeing at its forefront. By the time Bengal was partitioned and India achieved independence, theintegration of the Scheduled Castes, and thereby of the Namasudras, into the more dominantstreams of politics was more or less complete.10

Bandyopadhyay supported his claim of integration through an emphasis on the 1946 elec-tion results when the Congress won the vast majority of the 30 seats reserved for Sched-uled Caste candidates, the significant evidence of Scheduled Castes’ increasingidentification with movements and activities sponsored by the Hindu Mahasabha and itsaffiliated organizations under the rubric of what he called ‘Hinduisation’, and segments ofthe Dalit peasantry’s participation in Communist-led agitations, most notably, the Tebhagamovement. Some of Bandyopadhyay’s conclusions received support in an essay on the1947 Partition of Bengal by Partha Chatterjee, and Bidyut Chakrabarty’s study of Partitionin Bengal and Assam.11 One of his subsequent publications provided further evidence forhow ‘in the context of Partition politics, ‘religion’ replaced ‘caste’ as the defining criterionfor community boundaries in the collective imagination and political action of the dalit’.12

Bolstering his argument about Scheduled Caste integration, Bandyopadhyay documentedBengali Dalits’ considerable support for the Congress’ and Mahasabha’s campaigns to parti-tion their province which followed on the most unprecedented waves of communal vio-lence in Bengal in which Dalits participated as both perpetrators and victims.

It is likely significant then, that Sumit Sarkar introduced a note of caution against a‘seamless transition from ‘alienation to integration’’, in the context of his discussion ofMahananda Haldar’s Guruchand-Charit, a 1943 hagiography of Guruchand Thakur, a cen-tral figure of the Namasudra Matua sect.13 For him, there were too many tensions in thattext that did not square easily with the integration Bandyopadhyay had identified. Indeed,there seems to be considerable disagreement about the true extent of Dalits’ merger intothe Congress. Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, for instance, maintained that ‘the

514 Caste Politics and Partition in South Asian History


hold of Gandhi and Congress on Untouchable sympathies was considerably less than wasdepicted at the time’.14 Likewise, they warned against extrapolating from

electoral statistics and any general sense of the congeniality of Gandhi to many ordinaryUntouchables, to the proposition that a great mass of enthusiastic Untouchables were mobilisedinto the Gandhian and Congress cause in the pre-Independence period. There is simply noevidence of this.15

Similarly, Masayuki Usuda’s contemporaneously published essay on the Namasudra politi-cian Jogendranath Mandal, who was the leader of B.R. Ambedkar’s All-India ScheduledCastes Federation in Bengal, aimed to ‘clarify the process of his alienation from the main-stream of politics in the subcontinent’.16 Far from either accommodating to or beingintegrated by mainstream Indian nationalism, Usuda suggests that Mandal was ‘pushed’towards Partition; that the Namasudra movement was ‘constrained’.

UNITED PROVINCES AND ALL-INDIA

In contrast from Bandyopadhyay’s assessment of the Federation in Bengal, Owen Lynch’sethnographic study of the Jatavs in Agra evidenced the political leadership’s distinct pref-erence for Ambedkar’s party. Like elsewhere in India however, Lynch suggested a polari-zation in the Jatav leadership during the 1946 elections, split between leaders loyal to theCongress or the Federation. Despite his indication of the Federation’s ideological hege-mony, he explained the defeat of a Jatav Federation candidate by a Jatav Congress candi-date by the joint electoral arrangements of the elections, as well as the Federation’sfactions, lack of organization, and money.17

Building on Lynch’s relatively thin political history of this crucial moment, RamnarayanS. Rawat’s essays on the Federation in the United Provinces signaled an important depar-ture from what he termed the ‘mainstream history of Dalit’s integration with the nation’that had ‘erased many of the alternative strategies and positions that were embraced by Dal-its during the partition years’.18 His research challenged the ‘received wisdom in Indianhistoriography’ that Dalits largely supported the Congress-led nationalist movement andshowed that Dalits in UP ‘articulated a separate acchut identity forcefully enough to preventit submerging into Congress or national consensus’.19 Like Lynch before him, Rawatshowed that the formation of the Scheduled Castes Federation in UP emerged from Jatavand Chamar caste mahasabhas’ disillusionment with the Congress’ policies towards theircommunities. The Federation’s growing appeal indicated a distinct shift away from theCongress and a closer identification with Ambedkar’s attempts to claim and assert the polit-ical autonomy of Scheduled Castes. Interestingly, Rawat also demonstrated how evenHarijan leaders within the Congress like Jagjivan Ram, were hardly uncritical of themajority view within their own party and elaborated discontents remarkably similar to theFederation’s own criticisms of the Congress. In the wake of the Cabinet Mission’s refusalto recognize the Scheduled Castes as a separate political element in India’s polity, Rawat’sdocumentation of the Federation’s satyagraha against their exclusion from discussions aboutthe transfer of power and careful analysis of the 1946 primary elections, strongly suggestedthat the terms of the Poona Pact hindered the capacity of the Federation’s representativesto be elected and that the final electoral results were thus not an accurate reflection of Dalitpolitical will. Indeed, this was the central theme of Ambedkar’s famous text, What Congressand Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, wherein he analyzed the 1936 election results tocounter the Congress’ claim that it represented the untouchables. Rawat thus sought toseriously qualify and question Bandyopadhyay’s view that the Congress’ sweeping of the



seats reserved for Scheduled Caste representatives did in fact serve as a reliable index ofpolitical consciousness. Indeed, as he powerfully asserted: to ignore Ambedkar’s and theFederation’s critique that the electoral arrangements of the Poona Pact were biased in favorof caste Hindu electoral strength is ‘to perpetuate the dominance of the caste Hindu pointof view in the writing of history’.20

As though having anticipated some of Rawat’s criticisms in his account of the crisis ofDalit politics that accompanied the transfer of power at the all-India level, Bandyopadhyayproposed another set of explanations for the Federation’s dismal showing during the 1946elections: theirs was a crisis both of colonial patronage, as well as one of representation andlegitimacy. Although he conceded some explanatory power to the Federation’s claims thatthe property qualifications in force during the 1946 elections excluded the majority of theDalits from franchise, Bandyopadhyay bracketed the effect of the joint-electorate in thePoona Pact on the election’s outcome. Instead, he placed much more emphasis on the factthat the Federation’s misfortunes were explicable as a result of its own ‘near total lack oforganization’ and a program that had little to offer to the masses.21 His stance thus clearlycontradicted Mendelsohn’s and Vicziany’s view that the ‘root of Ambedkar’s political fail-ure was not of his own making’.22 On the other hand, Christophe Jaffrelot largely con-curred with Bandyopadhyay’s assessment, and argued that the Federation’s defeat was areflection of its ‘organisational weakness’.23 Additionally, and in consonance with the restof his work, Bandyopadhyay stressed that the Federation was contending against the ‘popu-lar appeal of nationalism and the euphoria of patriotism’ which sought its finest hour inousting British rule, as well as the Congress’ multifarious attempts to enlist the Dalits totheir cause.24 He therefore explained the Federation’s electoral failure as a result of its owninadequacies, and its inability to effectively counter the Congress’ ideological appeal. Thisargument elicited the following response from Anupama Rao:

Bandhyopadhyay [sic] is certainly right to argue that Congress hegemony was secured – in 1945as in 1932 – through a claim upon the political identity of the SCs as Hindu. Unlike Bandhyo-padhyay [sic], however, I would not focus on Dalits’ organizational weakness – an issueAmbedkar explicitly addressed in his 1945 text on the nature of Hindu majoritarianism – ortake recourse to a merely instrumental understanding of political constraint. By failing to relateAmbedkar’s political thought with his activism, Bandhyopadhyay [sic], also fails to address thesubstantive critique of the nation form and majoritarian logic that was the hallmark of Ambed-kar’s thought.25

Instead, Rao underscored the ‘impossible position in which Dalits found themselves as aterritorially dispersed minority with nowhere else to go…’26 Her point being, that whereasAmbedkar could envision the conversion of Muslim minority to Muslim nationality inhis Pakistan, or the Partition of India, a similar move would have been impossible for Dalitsas they did not constitute significant majorities in any province of British India.

Partition’s Aftermaths

PUNJAB

Surprisingly, despite the overall dominance of Punjab in Partition historiography, Dalitpolitical history of this region remains an area requiring further elaboration. Mark Juer-gensmeyer’s study of the Ad Dharm movement, like Lynch’s on the Jatavs of Agra, sug-gested a significant shift in the 1940s marked by the emergence of what he called ‘TheAmbedkar Alternative’. Ad Dharm leaders were drawn to Ambedkar’s Federation and as



a result, the Federation’s increasing popularity also spelled the demise of the Ad Dharmand the leadership’s increasing pre-occupation with questions of political representation.In a rather schematic sketch of the last two decades of British rule however, Juergens-meyer asserted: ‘During the final struggle for independence and the trauma involved inthe partitioning of the Punjab, issues regarding the lower castes were all but forgotten inthe chaos of migration and resettlement’.27 Rawat has with some justice questioned this‘forgetting’, and a detailed history of caste politics in Punjab during and after Partitionawaits its historian.28

Scholars of Punjab have, however, paid special attention to Dalits’ experience of Parti-tion and its aftermaths in the West. As previously indicated, Urvashi Butalia drew noticeto this dimension of Partition’s history in her renowned oral histories of the event, TheOther Side of Silence. Butalia’s discussion of the testimony provided by Maya Rani, a Hari-jan woman who worked as a sweeper at the time of interview, perhaps most strikinglyrevealed that Dalits were often excluded from the violence that accompanied Partition inPunjab – what she called a ‘bizarre kind of immunity’ – and a stark difference from theviolence in Bengal. Dalits’ alleged invisibility in the communally charged violence how-ever, lent to their erasure from Partition history itself: ‘I realized then that the extremevisibility of Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs in the history of Partition had worked toensure that those looking at Partition did not ‘see’ any other identities’.29

Once sensitized to this overlooking, Butalia showed how the scripting of Partition andits outcomes in religious and communal terms held serious consequences for Dalits’ accessto state-sponsored rehabilitation. Unlike relief camps set up in and around Delhi for Mus-lims in particular, no such similar space of respite was created for Dalits. Relief camp offi-cers, furthermore, discriminated between caste Hindus and Scheduled Castes, and thelatter, on account of being rejected entry into the camps, were ineligible for the rationsthat were provided therein. Further anomalies included the grant of compensatory landonly to those who owned land themselves, excluding from that ambit Dalits who tilledthe land but did not own it; or Maya Rani’s sense that Partition violence had ‘nothing todo with us’ – that communal violence did not negatively affect Dalit-Muslim relations.30

Butalia’s reflections on the contradictions and contextual contingencies of identificationunderscored what she and other scholars of Partition have emphasized – the need forattention to how individuals and communities defined along axes of caste, gender or classmediated the communal logic of Partition. Despite the discrepancies from the master nar-rative of Partition that she illuminates, it is clear that Dalits migrated in significant num-bers both to and from India, even if the conditions prompting their departure remainsomewhat unexamined. How, for instance, might one explain their migration, if theywere indeed immune from and indifferent to the maelstrom of violence that engulfedPunjab as Maya Rani’s testimony might suggest?

Pursuing and extending similar themes, Ravinder Kaur’s fieldwork amongst residentsof Partition settlement colonies in Delhi in the early 2000s grasped Dalit’s exclusion fromdominant accounts of migration as an instance of what she called ‘narrative absence’.31

Significantly, Kaur argued that the ‘common experience of displacement neither bridgednor rendered caste distinctions irrelevant’, an important corrective to assumptions of thedisintegration of social gradations in the vortex of traumatic experiences.32 She showedhow untouchable migrants to Delhi were largely, almost instinctively, separated fromtheir upper-caste Hindu counterparts as a consequence of the Indian government’s reset-tlement policies over the first two decades of the republic’s existence. As a consequence,Kaur documented how their physical separation was reflected in popular discourses andwhat she termed the ‘master narrative’ about Partition migration, which was voiced in a



predominantly male, upper-caste and middle-class register and excluded the distinctivenessand difference of Dalits’ experience of the same.

Kaur’s fieldwork yielded a rich body of information offering insights into some of theseemingly contradictory ways in which Dalits negotiated those trying years of resettle-ment. Some of these include the presence of a temple dedicated to a goddess popularamongst Punjabi upper-caste migrants in the midst of Rehgar Pura (the site of Kaur’sfieldwork), the same location from which Kanshi Ram launched the anti-upper-casteBahujan Samaj Party; or various Dalit migrants’ overwhelming sense of gratitude to theCongress for resettlement welfare, in stark contrast to upper-caste Punjabis who mini-mized the role of government in their own efforts at survival. Their gratitude is all themore striking given the miniscule capital expended on them compared to upper-caste ref-ugees. Another perplexing twist is illustrated in Kaur’s interview with Kanojia, a govern-ment employee and supporter of the Hindu nationalist organization the RashtriyaSwayamsevak Sangh, who despite his identification with the Arya Samaj and a newHindu identity, is disallowed from joining the officers’ union regardless of his own statusas a grade II officer and is compelled to become the leader of the ScheduledCastes ⁄Scheduled Tribes union composed of grade IV employees like sweepers, peonsand office boys. Kaur’s work thus suggests the perpetuation of caste discriminationthrough processes that one might otherwise have expected to level social difference.

Taking up the question posed by Butalia’s chapter, Gyanendra Pandey’s recent andevocatively titled study of Punjabi Dalit experience of Partition, ‘Nobody’s People’, chal-lenges the supposition that Dalits largely went unaffected by the violence of the time.Pandey’s essay tracks the reconstitution of the Punjabi ‘village community’ over Parti-tion’s cusp, and finds that the ‘available evidence makes it clear that Partition and Inde-pendence hardly left the Dalits untouched, even in the matter of being uprooted andexiled.’33 He does so by documenting, for instance, the extent of Dalit refugee migrationshortly after 1947, the considerable number of both forcible and circumstantial cases ofconversion to Islam and Christianity, the struggles over land and property that implicatedDalits as ‘refugees-at-home’, the conflicting available evidence on the degree to whichDalits benefitted from the rehabilitation program launched in East Punjab, and the delib-erate re-categorization of several Dalit communities into the status of Criminal Tribes.

Pandey thus suggests that ‘the Dalits of Punjab were ‘nobody’s people’ in 1947-8, inthat neither of the new nations, India or Pakistan, spoke for them in the way in whichthey spoke for Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs. From another point of view, they werenothing but other people’s ‘people’, in the sense of being their dependants orcharges…’34 In so doing, his research confirms – like Butalia’s and Kaur’s – the occlusionof Dalits’ experience of Partition in the normatively religious-communitarian categoriesthrough which this event was comprehended both in its historical present and recent his-toriography. A question he leaves unaddressed however is whether Punjabi Dalits indeedwore that cloak of ‘bizarre immunity’ during the acts of religiously motivated violence ofearly 1947. While Pandey focuses on the period immediately following August 1947, onewonders whether Maya Rani’s testimony to Butalia was in fact typical of the PunjabiDalit view and experience of the communal massacres earlier that year.

WEST BENGAL

One of the puzzling questions about postcolonial politics in West Bengal concerns howto explain the absence of caste politics in that state. This is all the more perplexing giventhe stark demographic fact that West Bengal is home, as per the 2001 census, to the sec-



ond largest number of Scheduled Castes in any Indian state, and third highest as per apercentage of its population – yet has never seen a significant number of Dalit ministerstake control of any of the major departments of government.35 Sekhar Bandyopadhyayrecently attempted a preliminary answer to this question, following on several decades ofresearch into caste politics in this region in the colonial period. Extending the insights ofhis previous works, he argued that the communal violence and physical displacement ofPartition reconfigured Dalit politics such that they were re-scripted in different politicalidioms:

… in postcolonial West Bengal the Partition violence and the refugee influx led to a rephrasingof the idioms of victimhood and resistance, placing less emphasis on caste and focusing more onthe predicament of displacement and the struggles of the refugees. These idioms could be moreeasily absorbed into the modern tropes of social justice deployed by the left-liberal ideologies ofthe state. Hence, while caste discrimination did not disappear, it was subsumed in a differentidiom, marked by the dominant discourse of class and religion. Dalits were thus compelled toadopt different strategies of survival and methods of empowerment that suited the conjuncturalshifts in the relations of power in post-Partition West Bengal.36

Bandyopadhyay showed how in East Pakistan, Dalits who had been unable to migrateprior to Partition like many amongst the upper-caste gentry, increasingly became the tar-gets of anti-Hindu intimidation and harassment and were apprehended as but part of theHindu minority. Acts of violence against them were increasingly assimilated in India bythe Congress and Hindu Mahasabha as evidence of the anti-Hindu policies of Pakistan,and as Joya Chatterji has shown in her book dealing with the post-Partition context, ledto retaliatory violence on Muslim minorities in West Bengal by Dalit refugees who hadfled East Pakistan.37 Bandyopadhyay thus argued that, ‘Caste mattered less in Bengal atthis juncture’.38 This decline in the importance of caste was also apparent in the formaldomain of politics. Indeed, as though in continuity with his observations about Dalitintegration, he submitted (while noting the sparse extant research and thus his own con-sequently broad overview), that ‘the idioms of caste were not articulated at the politicallevel in the post-1950 period, as the discourse of class, alongside the discourses of nationand religion, displaced that of caste at this historical juncture, marking the onset of free-dom and Partition’.39 From the 1950s onwards, Dalits were drawn to the rising com-munist tide over the course of the refugee movement, which, it is argued, was able tochannel their class-based grievances and retain their electoral loyalty. The manner, extentand implications of this displacement or eclipsing of caste by discourses of class, nationand religion are, as he indicates, subjects deserving further investigation.

Bandyopadhyay has long been concerned to situate his account of Dalit politics in a‘heterogeneous context of political change, where Dalit agency needs to be identified andrecognized’, and against what he called ‘teleological accounts’ which ‘tend to overshadowpalpable evidence of Dalit initiative, enterprise and success…’.40 To my mind, the idea ofagency raises the following questions: were Dalits then, agents in the making of Partitionand the decline of caste politics in Bengal? Were Partition and the accompanying declinein caste politics due to reasons endogenous to Dalit political will?

Future Research

As the above survey of historical research suggests, there exists no one, uniform narrativeabout caste politics and Partition. Where some historians have seen Dalit integration intomainstream Indian nationalism, others have noted the continued alienation of the political



leadership from the policies of the Indian National Congress and the articulation of apolitical ideology distinct from that party’s attempts at forging national unity. Whereas inBengal, Dalits were centrally implicated in the communal violence that accompanied Par-tition, in Punjab, they appear to have been largely aloof to the same. Yet, across theboard, there seems to be an acknowledgment that the politics and experience of caste,were in various ways eclipsed by both the discursive framing and actual enactment ofPartition in terms of the politics of religious conflict. Scholars have still to reflect how-ever, beyond the fact of observation, on what this eclipsing actually meant. How, forinstance, does this elision change our collective understanding of Partition and the culmi-nation of the freedom struggle against imperial rule in the formation of two nation-statesin 1947? Might we see this sublation of the caste question, as it were, as necessarilybound to the structuring of Partition in overwhelmingly communal terms? Did a‘‘nationalist resolution of the caste question’’ form one of the deep premises of the Hinducommunalist demand for Partition in Bengal? Was Partition, as much about the politicsof caste, as it undoubtedly was about those of religious community?

It is likely that adequate answers will not emerge until more research is undertaken thataddresses in greater detail questions that to some degree are suggested and posed by theexisting scholarship. We need to know more, for instance, about how Dalits who foundthemselves on the so-called ‘‘wrong side of the border’’ in West and East Pakistan fared,or whether freedom and independence from colonial rule lived up to the expectations ofthose who remained on the ‘‘right side’’; or whether and to what extent violencebetween unmarked Hindus and Muslims and its tragic consequences in forced migrationand resettlement led to the erasure of caste-differences between caste Hindus and Sched-uled Castes. Another question demanding further attention is whether Partition violencenecessarily meant that Dalits and Muslims severed solidarities that they had nurtured formany decades prior to this great divide. Yet another concerns whether the respectivepolitical regimes that came to power in India and Pakistan and particularly the dividedterritories of Punjab and Bengal in the immediate post-Partition context fulfilled thekinds of demands that Dalit leaders articulated during the late colonial period. One hopesthat future research will provide answers to these questions, thereby not only democratiz-ing our historical understanding of Partition, but fundamentally changing it.

Short Biography

Dwaipayan Sen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at The University ofChicago. His dissertation is a study focused on the career of Jogendranath Mandal, leaderof Dr. Ambedkar’s All India Scheduled Castes Federation in Bengal, which situates himin wider political-historical contexts.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of History, The University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, Illinois,United States, 60637. Email: [email protected].

1 U. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices From the Partition of India (New Delhi: Viking, 1998), 223.2 Ibid., 223.3 Ibid., 223.4 J. Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partion, 1932–47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994), 150–265.5 Ibid., 198.



6 Ibid., 197.7 Ibid., 198.8 S. Basu, ‘Partition Revisited’, Social Scientist, 26 ⁄ 11-12 (1998): 118.9 Chatterji, Bengal Divided, 203.10 S. Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872–47 (Richmond:Curzon Press, 1997), 173.11 P. Chatterjee, The Present History of West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1998), 39–40; B. Chakrabarty, The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932–47: Contour of Freedom (London: Routledge-Curzon, 2004), 112–4.12 S. Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Culture and Hegemony: Social Domination in Colonial Bengal (New Delhi: Sage Publica-tions, 2004), 192.13 S. Sarkar, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002), 76.14 O. Mendelsohn and M. Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 109.15 Ibid., 110–1.16 M. Usuda, ‘Pushed towards the Partition: Jogendranath Mandal and the Constrained Namasudra Movement’, inH. Kotani (ed.), Caste System, Untouchability and the Depressed, (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors,1997), 221.17 O.M. Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City of India (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 1969), 89.18 R.S. Rawat, ‘Making Claims for Power: A New Agenda for Dalit Politics in Uttar Pradesh, 1946–48’ ModernAsian Studies, 37 ⁄ 3 (2003): 589.19 R.S. Rawat, ‘Partition Politics and Achhut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit Poli-tics in UP, 1946–48’, in S. Kaul (ed.), The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, (New Delhi:Permanent Black, 2001), 114–5.20 Rawat, ‘Making Claims for Power’, 605.21 S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945–47’, Modern Asian Studies,34 ⁄ 4 (2000): 913.22 Mendelsohn and Vicziany, The Untouchables, 112.23 C. Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste, (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 83.24 Bandyopadhyay, ‘Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945–47’, 914.25 A. Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 159.26 Ibid., 159.27 M. Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in 20th-Century Punjab (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1982), 164.28 Rawat, ‘Making Claims for Power’, 588.29 Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 226.30 Ibid., 234.31 R. Kaur, ‘Narrative absence: An ‘Untouchable’ Account of Partition migration’, Contributions to Indian Sociology,42 ⁄ 2 (2008): 281–306.32 Ibid., 282.33 G. Pandey, ‘Nobody’s People: The Dalits of Punjab in the Forced Removal of 1947’, in R. Bessel and C.B.Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 300.34 Ibid., 319.35 Government of India Planning Commission, ‘Report of the Task Group on Development of Scheduled Castesand Scheduled Tribes’, <planningcommission.nic.in ⁄ aboutus ⁄ taskforce ⁄ inter ⁄ inter_sts.pdf>, accessed 25 Nov. 2011.36 S. Bandyopadhyay, ‘Partition and the Ruptures in Dalit Identity Politics in Bengal’, Asian Studies Review, 33(2009): 456.37 J. Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967 (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2007),183–5.38 Bandyopadhyay, ‘Partition and the Ruptures in Dalit Identity Politics in Bengal’, 460.39 Ibid., 463.40 Ibid., 464.

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Scheduled Tribes’, <planningcommission.nic.in ⁄ aboutus ⁄ taskforce ⁄ inter ⁄ inter_sts.pdf>, accessed 25 Nov. 2011.Jaffrelot, C., Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).Juergensmeyer, M., Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in 20th-Century Punjab (Berkeley:

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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).Pandey, G., ‘Nobody’s People’: The Dalits of Punjab in the Forced Removal of 1947’, in R. Bessel and C. B.

Haake (eds.), Removing Peoples: Forced Removal in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009),297–319.

Rao, A., The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).Rawat, R. S., ‘Partition Politics and Achhut Identity: A Study of the Scheduled Castes Federation and Dalit Politics

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Rawat, R. S., ‘Making Claims for Power: A New Agenda for Dalit Politics in Uttar Pradesh, 1946-48’, ModernAsian Studies, 37 ⁄ 3 (2003): 585–612.

Sarkar, S., Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002).Usuda, M., ‘Pushed towards the Partition: Jogendranath Mandal and the Constrained Namasudra Movement’, in

H. Kotani (ed.), Caste System, Untouchability and the Depressed (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors,1997), 221–74.



Documents

Caste Politics and Partition in South Asian History