Does Time Stand Still in ‘Riot-Prone’ India?

In the Orientalist imagination, India was a timeless and changeless place that held on to its ancient religion and primitive customs, in stark contrast to the rapid social changes that had engulfed Europe. This idea, though thoroughly debunked, appears to ring true when it comes to the history of Hindu-Muslim violence in India. As one looks at the recent communal flare-ups that took place in Khargone and Jahangirpuri, it will perhaps be instructive to go back to another April of years gone by.

In April 1926, the riots that ‘erupted’ in Calcutta were of an “unusually acute nature”¹, with 110 killed and 975 injured in two phases of prolonged fighting.² The incident that sparked the riots, in a curious mirror to the recent flare-ups, included Hindu processionists playing music outside a mosque, and a Muslim crowd that objected to it and proceeded to attack the procession when the offending music was not stopped. Just this similarity is interesting enough, and can be used to make a fairly banal (and inaccurate) point about the long history of Hindu-Muslim rivalry and their intractable mutual grievances. The official report on the riots, in fact, begins by invoking the “age-long rivalry between the Hindus and the Muhammadans”, while also blaming the “existing state of tensions” which had made the violence “inevitable”.³ Such analyses make Hindu-Muslim violence seem like a natural phenomenon, an idea reinforced by the use of words like ‘riot-prone’, ‘eruption’, and ‘flare-up’. A closer look at the 1926 riots can help illustrate how these incidents and the issues that ignite them are wholly constructed, both then and now.

The issue of ‘music before mosques’ had incited all the major riots in Bengal in 1926.⁴ However, as P.K. Dutta notes in War Over Music, the “issue seemed to have had no immediate past.” It had not caused problems in centuries of co-habitation between Hindus and Muslims, and there are no government records of the issue igniting communal violence from 1893 to 1922. By 1923, we see some indication that the issue had become important for Muslims, as the Bengal Pact, signed that year between Hindu and Muslim leaders to ease communal tensions, guaranteed that no music would be played in front of mosques.

Contemporary observers saw the issue in relation to Muslim claims over public spaces, a response to the Hindu attempts to ban cow slaughter in public.⁵ Though the Muslim anxieties about ownership of public spaces were real, the issue of ‘music before mosques’ was constructed. This was seen as a sign of Muslim aggressiveness then, in much the same way as it is being seen by some commentators today. Mirroring the Muslim aggressiveness, Hindu communalists were fervent in their efforts to prevent any ‘encroachment’ of the public sphere. They resisted police orders to change the procession route and scheduled processions to coincide with the evening prayers. In places where Muslims had erected new mosques Hindus immediately wished to take processions past it.⁶ Not to be left behind, Muslim leaders like Sir Abdur Rahim and H. Suhrawardy gave provocative speeches, inciting their followers to resist Hindu processions.⁷

The 1926 police reports have referred to the Hindu processions (and the resistance to them) as “experiments” — their purpose was to determine how much of the public sphere could be appropriated for one’s own community without facing resistance from the other. Historian Gyanendra Pandey has linked this to a ‘destabilisation of custom’, caused by the colonial government’s attempts to record ‘prevailing customs’ and establish them as law.⁸ In response, both communities attempted to re-write history and invent traditions that would give them a more expansive set of rights. The election of Narendra Modi as Prime Minister in 2014, which signalled the beginning of a “great Hindu revival” to Hindu Nationalists, has brought about another such ‘destabilisation of custom’. The growing number of clashes over communal symbols and issues post-2014 are nothing but renewed “experiments”, aimed at gauging how far the minority community can be pushed, and the extent to which the state is willing to back Hindu communalists. The zeal of the modern experimenter extends beyond the public sphere — apparent from the images of Hindu youths climbing onto minarets to hoist saffron flags — and the ongoing ‘bulldozer politics’ will only embolden him to pursue more extreme experiments.

In April 1926, it was a single drummer disrupting the azan at a Calcutta mosque that sparked the riots (as the police had compelled all other drummers to stop playing). The fact that such a trivial incident could lead to such gory events suggests that the ‘provocation’ was only a “consensual symbol”⁹, a dramatized ritual to signal the start of fighting. The fight today is much less equal and the provocation much less consensual, as Muslims in India comprise only around 15% of the population, compared to nearly 50% in 1926 Bengal. The modern counterpart of that single drummer, possibly his reincarnation, uses a DJ system and loudspeakers. Yet, he occupies the same ritual space in the cosmic time-loop of communal violence in India.

1. M.N Roy, describing the nature of the Hindu-Muslim Problem. Roy notes that the news of the bloody riot had been flashed all over the world by Reuters, as proof that India was unable to govern itself. Roy, a contemporary observer, believed that the riot was a conspiracy by the government to divide the Swaraj Party which was coming under revolutionary influence. [source]
2. Dutta, P. K. (1990). War over Music: The Riots of 1926 in Bengal. Social Scientist, 18(6/7), 38–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3517478
3. Gossman, Patricia. Riots and Victims: Violence and the Construction of Communal Identity Among Bengali Muslims, 1905–1947. London: Routledge, 2019. Internet resource. p.98–99
4. Apart from the Calcutta riots, this includes riots in Pabna, Dacca and Kharagpur that took place later in the year. In some places there existed other inciting factors. For instance, in Pabna, there was the issue of desecrated Hindu idols found on roads. Here, Hindu reprisals took the form of deliberate playing of music before the Khilafapatti mosque.
5. This is discussed by both Dutta and Gossman.
6. Gossman. p.97
7. Gossman. p.101
8. Gyanendra Pandey, “Rallying ‘Round the Cow — Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, c. 1888–1917,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 120.
9. Dutta, 1990.