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Fig. 1. The Peoples Corner Bookshop, College Street, Calcutta.
Fig. 2. College Street area, Calcutta. In the background is the Baptist Mission and Meeting Hall.
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ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
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Fig. 3. Street scene near College Street, Calcutta.
War, Migration and Alienation in Colonial Calcutta: the Remaking of Muzaffar Ahmad
by Suchetana Chattopadhyay
INTRODUCTION Muzaffar Ahmad (18891973) came to Calcutta in 1913. His ambition was to be a writer. When the First World War ended, he was rethinking his decision to be solely a cultural activist. By 1922, his political activism had led him towards a Marxist perspective of society and he had emerged as the central figure of the first socialist nucleus in the city. He was later to become one of the most prominent Communists in the Indian city where the Communist movement has proved most resilient. This article examines the war years and argues they were crucial in socially reshuffling the ingredients that went into the making of a changed political
History Workshop Journal Issue 64 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm036 The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
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consciousness. It examines Muzaffar Ahmads urban social milieu and the political trends evident among the Calcutta intelligentsia during the 1910s, and the ways in which they shaped the process of ideological transition.1 The journeys from the rural to the urban have frequently been viewed through the prism of migration. Autobiographical writings, fiction and historical narratives are replete with experiences of collective and individual changes. This article, however, focuses not on the process of migration from the countryside but on the sources of self-transformation in the city. Taking the early urban experiences of an impoverished lower middle-class Muslim intellectual from Eastern Bengal (now Bangladesh) as a frame, it investigates the continuously shifting registers of alienation and marginalization as experienced by a migrant-outsider, and their interplay with forces of opposition and resistance in a colonial city during the First World War. A wider context shaped the political tendencies visible in wartime Calcutta: the extraordinary drain of resources by the colonizers in the form of money, men and material which directly contributed to a sharp deterioration in the living conditions of ordinary people; the conditional support extended to the colonizers by the mainstream nationalist leaders in the hope of major concessions after the war; the determination of different revolutionary groups to weaken and overthrow the temporarily beleaguered imperial order; and British anxiety to maintain control over the subcontinent through heightened repression. The article demonstrates the impact of these strategies on the urban milieu in which Muzaffar Ahmad found himself and which contributed to his transition. STREETS UNKNOWN Why did he come to the city? In 1913, Muzaffar Ahmad was just one more in the sea of poor lower middle-class migrants. They crowded the urban space that was Calcutta, in search of a better life which often proved to be elusive. As his existence became intertwined with the city, Muzaffar gradually ceased to display strong attachment to his rural origins. Despite periodic absence, the city was to become the setting of his social and political activities. He remained in touch with the rural milieu he had left behind, yet it was no longer his world. Muzaffars immediate rural environment had propelled him towards the city. In the vortex of metropolitan upheavals, his life would take a completely different turn. A new political focus, previously absent, was going to emerge. For those born in genteel poverty in the rural areas of Bengal in the 1880s, the city represented a gateway to material opportunities and social advancement. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the middle and lower strata of landed proprietors in the Bengal countryside were increasingly unable to sustain themselves from agrarian income. The impending loss of class and property could only be prevented by branching out to civil professions. Western education, and particularly some
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knowledge of English, was the bridge that had to be crossed to make ones way in a colonized society.2 The material constraints in Sandwip, a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, a part of the Noakhali district in Eastern Bengal at the time, compelled Muzaffar to migrate to Calcutta.3 The familiar, unlit, relatively less crowded villages and district towns suddenly gave way to an alien, luminous, overpopulated, and densely constructed urban social space. This sharp change in the physical form of the material location could be bewildering, visually arresting and unsettling. Civic infrastructures gave Calcutta its distinct metropolitan features. By 1913, it had regained its status as the capital of reunified Bengal, but had lost its role as the administrative centre of British India. As if to compensate for the fall from its highly ambiguous pre-eminence as the centre of colonial rule, massive projects were undertaken to spruce up its image as the leading centre of colonial capital. Even this position was to be taken away after the First World War.4 But in the pre-war and inter-war years, Calcutta was still a showpiece of colonial urban development. The pride and high hopes of the colonial municipal planners in 191213 in the capital of the newly created Presidency of Bengal found reflection in the following pronouncement: Its trade, commerce, industries and its civic amenities have all developed during the year and there seems no reason for doubting that its prosperity will continue or for apprehending that it may forfeit its claim to be the first city in India. Among the civic facilities expanded in the course of 191213, the report focused on the lighting system of the city. Proudly announced was the illuminating power of the 443 new gaslights, bringing the total number of street-lamps fuelled by gas to 10,502. The proposal to install electric lights in certain selected streets was also considered.5 City lights beckoned though their dazzle could not hide the contradictions of urban existence. Uncertainty immediately engulfed the impoverished migrant upon arrival. The transfer of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi in 1912 meant the loss of major sources of government jobs and patronage.6 The racial hierarchy of a colonized city produced its own paradoxes. The groups and classes populating the city were concentrated in different geographic zones. Neighbourhoods to the north and the east of the city constituted the native quarters. This area of intense density, a maze of narrow alleys and main roads, housed the principal Indian-owned markets, shops and business centres. The city-centre and areas to the south and west were well-planned with wide roads. European-owned banks, government and public offices, leading hotels and the spacious residences of business and administrative personnel were located in these zones. While the densely populated north was overwhelmingly Indian in composition, the sparsely inhabited south was predominantly European in character.7 Claims by
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civic authorities of developing the infrastructure were underwritten by hidden disparities in resource allocation. The lighting system, occupying such a pride of place in the Municipal Report of 191213, demonstrated a spatial hierarchy shaped directly by the priorities of colonial capital. In the northern wards, the Indian population complained that gaslights installed there could not be relied upon. On the other hand, Store Road in Ballygunge, a fashionable European neighbourhood in south Calcutta, was the area selected for the introduction of electricity supply, and was equipped with free electric lights for three months as part of an experimental demonstration.8 The civic infrastructure was also not adequate to deal with a substantial and escalating death rate from epidemics. Plague, dengue, malaria, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, tuberculosis and respiratory diseases claimed their share of victims. However, the authorities did try to introduce better funeral arrangements that year. The dead were classified and care was taken to dispose of their bodies according to religion. Various alterations and improvements of the cremation and burial grounds were made. Iron railings replaced the old boundary wall of Gori Goriban cemetery in Park Circus, and a small piece of low-lying land within it was raised and made available for fresh graves.9 This was the cemetery where Muzaffar Ahmad was buried sixty years later. The city also came to be associated with images of impending social catastrophe. Newspaper reports spoke of rise in traffic accidents from an enormous increase in the number of motor cars. Other dangers lurked on the street corners. On the eve of the First World War and during the early years of the war, assaults on pedestrians by drunken European soldiers and robberies by organized gangs were reported in Indian newspapers. In 1914, a confrontation between college students and European soldiers in a railway station led to demands for a government investigation.10 The Bengal intelligentsia was increasingly caught up in the economic and political issues which came to the forefront with the outbreak of war. As the colony was drawn more and more into an imperialist war-effort, gloomy forecasts of a regional famine were made amid spiralling food prices and unemployment. The mainstream nationalist leadership extended its support to the imperial war-effort in the hope of future political reforms. No attempt was made to channel wartime popular grievances against the hardships imposed by colonialism into an anti-colonial mass movement. As conditions kept deteriorating, issues related to the poor received increased attention from sections of the intelligentsia. Attitudes towards the poor ranged from a liberal-humanist, paternalist and genuinely felt compassionate protectionist concern to impulses of undisguised terror and loathing. A palpable anxiety centring on proprietorial control over society was evident. Alarmed middle-class voices, fearful that sections of the criminalized urban poor were about to take over the streets, demanded greater police protection. At the same time, the colonial state was not seen as sufficiently reliable to uphold
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justice. An extension of police powers to suppress openly rebellious members of the intelligentsia drew condemnation. There was outrage over racist attacks, including fatal beatings inflicted on domestic servants and workmen by European officials, officially treated as accidental deaths from ruptured spleen. Anti-colonial sentiments were also expressed on what was seen as the arbitrary detention of nationalist revolutionaries from a Hindu Bengali middle-class background and of pan-Islamic preachers under the wartime security acts. Outside Nakhoda Mosque, the most important monument to Islamic worship in Calcutta, the police picked up Maulavi Imamuddin, a pan-Islamist described as a warrior of faith, in late 1916. The Muslim press claimed that he had no political interests whatsoever and his indefinite internment would produce a baneful influence on the public mind. During the war years, the British surveillance network was accused of manufacturing suspects to justify the repression of political dissent, branded as extremism, sedition and terror. Press censorship, a strategy to prevent anti-colonial opinions from spreading, also attracted strong criticism.11 These extraordinary wartime social and political anxieties were to merge and pave the way for greater, though temporary, post-war solidarity among the middle and upper-classes of Indian society despite the community identities that had emerged under colonial rule in Bengal. The complex relationship between social hierarchy and sectional configurations, phenomena made acute by the colonial circumstance, shaped the multi-layered political culture of Calcutta. Popular politics reflected the volatile interconnections between nationalism, working-class unrest, and communal hostilities. THE FLAME AND THE FLAG OF ISLAM The social stimulus behind popularization of political Islam in such an environment stemmed from the interconnections of official policy, especially the politics of colonial census, the complexities of mainstream nationalism which freely borrowed ideological symbols of Hindu revivalist politics, and competition with different ranks of the Hindu community over the restricted resources available to Indians in a colonial milieu. During the second decade of the last century, Muslim identity-politics displayed contradictory social directions. The ideological fluidity accommodated sentiments both antiimperialist and sectional in character. However, during and immediately after the war, the sectional components of identity-thinking were largely superseded by widespread grievance against colonial rule. The resurgence of pan-Islamist politics in the second decade was directly linked with increased western incursions into Turkish territory. It influenced rising anti-colonial feelings among Muslim populations of the colonial world. The change in and struggle over the leadership of the community reflected this political shift in the years immediately preceding the war. The reunification of Bengal as an administrative unit in 1912 had meant withdrawal of social power and privileges which the Muslim proprietor
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classes had temporarily come to experience in East Bengal from 1905. This led to acute political resentment not only towards the colonial government but also towards the loyalist, mostly Urdu-speaking aristocratic leaders. The capture of the leadership of the All-India Muslim League in 1912 by pan-Islamist and anti-loyalist forces, along with the Lucknow Pact of 1916 between the Muslim League and the Congress (to share seats in the elected bodies and exert pressure on the government to cede greater power to Indians after the war), contributed to the popularity of militant antigovernment politics among large sections of the city Muslims. A. K. Fazlul Haq and Abul Kalam Azad, new leaders respectively representing the Bengali and Urdu-speaking intelligentsia, were closely aligned with these developments. The different shades of Islamist politics they represented ranged from opposition to the government, as in the case of Haq, to militant anti-colonial resistance, as evident in Azads actions. Extensive joint campaigns for civil liberties were generated during the war by arrests of Indian revolutionaries, mainly from a Bengali Hindu middleclass background, and of pan-Islamists who opposed and tried to subvert British war-efforts. After the war, the Khilafat and Non-Co-operation movements became the vehicles of this unity.12 For a small though significant minority, participation in and support for these anti-colonial mass movements involved rejection of the political authority and ideology of pan-Islamist and nationalist leaders. From an anti-authoritarian communitarianism they would move on to communism. Reshuffled in the course of the war and reconfigured during the postwar anti-colonial mass upsurge, their politics underwent a transformation. IN AND AROUND COLLEGE STREET Anti-colonial political Islam dominated the world of the urban Muslim intelligentsia when Muzaffar arrived in the city. His social milieu in Calcutta between 1913 and 1919 was initially the student community. He also developed close and deepening links with wider, mainly Muslim, middleclass intellectual circles. These literary associations, rather than the student community, were to become the focus of his social existence in the city. Though Muzaffars student life in the city was relatively brief, he became familiar with a mode of social existence and politics associated with the young intelligentsia. Students displayed vigorous political interests. From 1905, students from a Hindu middle-class background became visible in nationalist politics. The process was followed by increased recruitment of Bengali Hindu middle-class youth, especially students, into the nationalist revolutionary networks, directing acts of individual terror against European administrators and their Indian collaborators.13 Muzaffar was acquainted with this form of politics. One of his most prominent classmates in the Noakhali District School had been initiated into revolutionary nationalism and served time in prison.14 A climate of admiration and
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sufficient support among students allowed the nationalist revolutionaries to function. The student community sheltered them and supplied new recruits. Neighbourhoods in and around College Street, a central thoroughfare of north Calcutta, provided the physical spaces where different forms of anti-colonial dissent emerged and were sustained. Student lodgings, college residences, top colonial educational institutions for Indians such as Presidency College and Calcutta University, various institutions linked with the public activities of the intelligentsia, as well as College Square, a swimming pool and park could all be used to host meetings and discussions. With this concentration of the literati the locality was also a flourishing centre of the book trade. As well as the offices of most of Calcuttas booksellers and publishers, including the journals Muzaffar Ahmad came to be associated with, it also housed the second-hand book-market. While the established booksellers and publishers mainly came from a Bengali Hindu middle and upper-class background, impoverished Muslims monopolized the used book-trade. They would spread their wares on jute cloths and sacks on the pavements of College Street, where middle-class clients came and browsed through page after page for hours. These traders and the bookbinders, a profession also dominated by Muslims, created a daily social link between the urban working-class and the Calcutta intelligentsia.15 The burgeoning underworld, consisting of hoodlums and pickpockets with a large proportion of unemployed Muslim workingclass people who had turned to crime, also enjoyed a presence in this area.16 Though volatile and prone to riot in times of acute hardship, this segment was also responsive to the widespread anti-state upsurge which became evident in the post-war period. Students flocked to the city from the countryside to study at the Calcutta colleges. Among these, a sizeable section came from East Bengal. Muzaffar was part of this inflow. As aliens in a metropolitan milieu, students from outside Calcutta drew sustenance from district, communal, ethnic, linguistic, caste and provincial affiliations. Lodgings often brought together students and non-students who shared one of these identities. It gave them the security of a collective existence in an otherwise unfamiliar environment. The maze of alleys, by-lanes and streets connecting College Street with the surrounding areas of the North were the heart of mess-life in Calcutta. This was the world of the lone male who had left behind his family unit when he arrived in the metropolis in search of education and jobs. Wealth and social status divided the mess communities. Lower middleclass students rented the stairwell of a rooming house as a place to sleep at night. Religious distinctions and their minority status within the student community often made it difficult for Muslim students from the Bengal countryside or from other provinces to find suitable living space. The shortage of accommodation sometimes forced Muslim students to give up their studies in Calcutta and return home. In 1912, the year before Muzaffar
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came to the city, the plight of Muslim students refused admission to Calcutta colleges and hostels generated controversy. The lack of housing was highlighted in particular. Hindu landlords and mess-keepers often refused to let out their premises part of a wider and persistent social problem reflecting the communal prejudices of Hindu property-owners. Some less prejudiced and economically pragmatic Bengali Hindu landlords, however, were willing to rent out their property to Muslims. In 1918, the Bengal Muslim Literary Society, an association to which Muzaffar Ahmad belonged, was able to rent a portion of a house owned by a Bengali Hindu medical practitioner.17 A significant number of students earned board and lodging as private tutors, staying with the middle-class Muslim families who employed them. Muzaffar stayed with one family for four years during the war, in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood close to College Street.18 This then was Muzaffar Ahmads material environment when he arrived in Calcutta and enrolled at Bangabashi College for a pre-graduation course. Bangabashi was part of a cluster of colleges affiliated to Calcutta University, set up at the initiative of the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia to provide greater educational opportunities to the increasing numbers of Bengali middle-class students. These were self-supporting institutions, dependent on tuition fees. Bangabashi was one of the largest, and unlike some other institutions it admitted Muslim students. Muslim lower middle-class students were attracted to institutions like these because of their low fees. However, Muslims formed a tiny minority within the student body. Among more than a thousand students enrolled in 1914, only twenty-seven were Muslims.19 Muzaffar was one of them. Muzaffar failed to qualify in the pre-graduation examination and gave up his studies. Among Muslim and indigent students, this was not unusual. The proportion of successful Muslim students was low and poverty prevented the unsuccessful ones from continuing. Though Muzaffar was a student only for two years in Calcutta, College Street and its surrounding neighbourhoods remained his regular haunt. During 19191920, he resided of the at the literary society office at College Street. He was a habitue Book Company. This shop opened in College Square in 1917, and quickly out-manoeuvred older, established European-owned book firms like Thacker-Spinck to become the largest importer of foreign books, including banned literature. The owner, Girindranath Mitra, was always welcoming even though the shop had begun to attract police attention for its stock of potentially seditious literature and its association with early communists like Muzaffar and with nationalist revolutionaries. Some of these revolutionaries even secured employment there. The shop was also well known as a meeting-place of Bengali writers and intellectuals from diverse social backgrounds and literary circles.20 The bookshops, the mess-system, the cheap restaurants, the tea-stalls and the all-pervasive mess-life continued to provide the realms of social
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interactions for Muzaffar, constituting the public sphere where he circulated. In an age of greater Hindu-Muslim co-operation and widespread Muslim antipathy towards the British government, he felt drawn towards the joint anti-colonial struggle. The Indian National Congress had extended its support to the government with the onset of war. The nationalist revolutionaries comprised the only branch of the nationalist movement not to have done so. They were trying to subvert the war-effort and thereby weaken colonial rule in India. Muzaffars location made him quite close to their field of recruitment. Besides, their individual courage in the face of police torture and state repression made them contemporary middle-class youth icons. But inspired by Hindu revivalist ideology, they often refused to include Muslims. Members of the Anushilan Samiti were openly antagonistic to Muslims. The Jugantar group was less so but, like Anushilan, was saturated with Hindu imagery of nationhood.21 Muzaffar later wrote of his mix of attraction and antipathy to these groups: Considering my mental condition in the second decade of this century and the romance that lay in the terrorist movement, it was not impossible for me to join the terrorist revolutionary camp, but there were . . . obstacles . . . The terrorist revolutionaries drew their inspiration from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyays Anandamath. This book was filled with [Hindu] communal ill-will . . . The fundamental message of the book lay in Bankimchandras invocation Vande-Mataram. The song contains the lines: Thou, as strength in arms of men Thou, as faith, in hearts, dost reign, ... For, thou hast ten-armed Durgas power . . . How could a monotheist Muslim youth utter this invocation?22 In nationalist political culture, the country was synonymous with a mothergoddess. Since idolatrous and Hindu chauvinist symbols dominated all branches of nationalism, they excluded Muzaffar and other Muslims. Muzaffar was unable to commit himself totally to this form of anti-colonial politics. However, wider anti-imperialist forums and mobilizations continued to attract him.23 Instead of direct political engagement, Muzaffar gradually turned to fulltime cultural activism. While he was a student, like most lone migrants in an alien environment, Muzaffar had looked for some kind of an association which would provide a sense of collectivity. He was already a published author and soon turned to literary circles. At the initiative of a group of students like himself, an association had been set up in 1911: the Bengal Muslim Literary Society (Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Samiti) devoted to the popularization and strengthening of Bengali literature among Bengali Muslims.24 Shunned by the ideological and social prejudices of
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Hindu upper and middle-class society, the tiny Muslim intelligentsia in Calcutta formed community-based associations of their own. Such associations indicated a desire for religious consolidation along exclusivist lines. Similar organizations also developed among Muslim workers. The dialectic behind the formation of these and other organizations for migrants, minorities and the marginalized represented a complex mosaic of identity and difference rooted in the social matrix of the city. Out of the contraction and expansion of various types of communities and networks, intersecting collectivities were being continuously constituted, reconstituted and dissolved. The social need propelling Muzaffar towards the Bengal Muslim Literary Society also made him associate with other non-exclusivist transcommunal associations. These continuous circulations between larger and smaller social spaces indicated the contradictions and convergences relating to Gemeinschaft (community of shared values) and Gesellschaft (civil society) in the city.25 The emergence of the Bengal Muslim Literary Society also signalled an awareness of being a minority within a minority, producing the need to separate from Urdu-dominated literary culture. A mess run by a group of Muslim students living at Choku Khansama Lane in the north acted as its office. The society office later moved to 32 College Street. Muzaffar started living at this address in 1919, as the society became the focus of his cultural activities.26 Though the Bengal Muslim Literary Society aimed to work within the Bengali Muslim literate community, it developed a plural character. The organization offered membership to Bengali Hindu intellectuals interested in promoting the Bengali language among Muslims in a province where majority of Bengali-speakers were classified as followers of Islam. It acted as a launch-pad for budding Bengali Muslim authors. The ethno-linguistic cultural politics of this society made it contribute to, rather than create a separate space outside, the existing Bengali literary scene dominated by Bengali Hindu writers, and it was affiliated to the Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, the federation of literary societies in Bengal. When Muzaffar joined the society in 1913, it was in disarray. Alongside prominent Bengali Muslim writers and political activists well known in the Calcutta literary circuit he contributed to its revival. Soon Muzaffar became a full-time literary activist. Many leading writers from a Bengali Hindu background, including one who on principle never donated his novels, gave their work to the Society Reading Room. Work in the literary society helped Muzaffar develop connections with Muslim writers, journalists and political activists as well as members of the Bengali Hindu intelligentsia. A minor figure associated with this society, Abdur Rezzaq Khan, became his first socialist colleague in the early 1920s. He also met his first recruit, Abdul Halim, in the literary societys reading room in 1922. Since this was voluntary work, to survive Muzaffar took up various temporary jobs throughout the war years. Unable to retain any employment for long, he was forced to shift from one to the next, as teacher, clerk,
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translator and finally a full-time journalist. While he was a student, during a summer vacation, he taught at a madrasa (Muslim religious school) in the Kidderpore dock area. Earlier madrasa education in the village is likely to have proved useful here. He also worked as a private tutor, teaching young boys from Muslim families. In the course of his career as a tutor in Calcutta, he stayed with the family of a nineteenth-century Urdu writer, Munshi Alimuddin, in a lively Muslim commercial area close to College Street. Muzaffar also worked briefly at the office of the Inspector of Schools. Most of these jobs were probably secured through his acquaintance with members of the Literary Society. Muzaffar was employed for the longest stretch at the Bengali Government Printing Press. His job was to sift through volumes of paper in the cavernous storage sheds of the East India Company-era Writers Building where the Press was located. He also worked as a clerk in a slaughterhouse, issuing tickets for the slaughter of animals but spared the unpalatable task of slaughtering the animals myself. He also accepted and soon gave up another unpleasant job. Despite a reasonable salary and the risk of future unemployment, he did not continue as an official translator of Arabic and Urdu material in the Home Political Department of the Bengal Government.27 THE REALM OF TANGLED CULTURAL POLITICS The size of the Muslim intelligentsia was small. According to the Census of 1911, fewer than 6,000 Muslims belonged to the civil professions. As a white-collar segment they were not only outnumbered by the Hindus (in the proportion of 7 to 1) but even less numerous than the Christians.28 Yet their literary activities in Calcutta attracted a great deal of official monitoring and censorship during the 1910s. The Urdu and Arabic press acted as vehicles of pan-Islamic ideas. Anti-British and pan-Islamic sentiments were also voiced in the Bengali and English journals and newspapers. They stood for joint Hindu-Muslim action against the government.29 Muzaffars work in the literary society transformed him into a prolific writer and so paved the way for his later turn to political journalism. The subjects he chose and the debates he participated in reflected the gradual shifts in his own intellectual and political position. The larger political developments played a key role in changing the content of his writings. As a student in Noakhali he had been interested in politics. After the Lucknow Pact of 1916 when Hindu-Muslim unity was very much in the air, he had participated in all kinds of political meetings, including a protest rally demanding the freedom of political prisoners. Muzaffar was also part of the audience that had gathered to listen to the speeches made at the Congress and Muslim League conferences held in the city in 1917.30 He knew political figures linked with the literary society who were prominent as Muslim League and Congress activists, but refrained from
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joining either organization. His political position during this period was multi-layered and reflected a confusion of attitudes. In this sense, he was very much a part of the Muslim intellectual milieu in Calcutta, experiencing the pull of identity-politics from diverse directions. A brief examination of Muzaffars writings published in Bengal Muslim journals emphasizes the fluidity of his political positions. Muzaffars articles from the 1910s, only a few of which survive, were mainly excursions in cultural polemics, conforming to contemporary middle-class notions of a Bengali Muslim socio-cultural identity. Between 1916 and 1921, Muzaffar was well acquainted with the Bengali Muslim literati and the leading literary journals printed during these years. Muzaffar worked as the assistant editor of Bangiyo Musalman Sahitya Patrika (Bengal Muslim Literary Journal), the organ of the Bengal Muslim Literary Society31 He composed its news pages.32 By 1919 he had earned praise in the wider Muslim literary circles as a skilled writer whose articles were a pleasure to read and was listed as one of the leading Bengali Muslim essayists.33 The periodicals advocated Hindu-Muslim unity and emphasized the ethno-linguistic component of Bengali Muslim culture. They also reflected the social aspirations of the Bengali Muslim middle classes by stressing the cultural politics of self-improvement. The first issue of Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika, in 1918, while elaborating its principles, stated this agenda clearly. The discourse of self-improvement in the Muslim middle-class context included the goal of becoming equal to the Hindu middle classes in terms of education, culture and socio-economic achievements. It was a fragment of the wider emphasis on improvement and had motivated both Hindu and Muslim members of the proprietor classes in Muzaffars rural milieu.34 Emphasis on the ethno-linguistic cultural roots of Bengal Muslims plunged these journals into lengthy debates on the language question. There was broad agreement that Persian-Arabic traditions provided Muslims the world over with their spirituality and culture, and that Urdu was the vehicle of Islamic glory in India. Yet the intellectuals writing in these journals felt that Bengali, more than any other language, was closest to the culture of the Muslims of the region. These writings projected Bengali as the mother tongue and the language of folk culture. Muzaffar strongly endorsed this opinion and, like the other writers in these magazines, stressed the Islamicization of content rather than form. In an article published in 1917, Urdu Bhasha o Bangiya Musalman (The Urdu Language and the Bengali Muslim), he denounced all those who tried to impose Urdu on Bengali Muslims, stating that no Islamic wave could rob them of their language.35 These intellectuals also argued against the deliberate suppression of Turko-Persian and Arabic words from the Bengali vocabulary by Hindu writers, while encouraging the exchange of ideas, debates and dialogues with Bengali Hindu intellectuals. This was not a self-enclosed world. Hindu women authors who wrote on the travails of the respectable
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Bengali middle-class woman contributed to these journals and received praise. Many writers from Hindu Bengali backgrounds wrote on topics of interest to both the Hindu and the Muslim middle-classes.36 The journals published articles in abundance on the past glory of Islam. The pre-history of Arabs, the might of the Moorish Kings in southern Spain and the literary and scientific achievements in medieval West Asia were some of the recurring themes. Evidently a useable past for Bengali Muslims was being constructed in these pages. Articles on the status of Muslim women were also published, arguing that Islam had traditionally accorded a high place to women and emphasizing the necessity of the veil as the marker and site of female and communal honour. Muzaffar also participated in the ongoing debate on gender and argued in favour of female education as well as the veil.37 At this juncture, he still saw himself as a devout Muslim and was very much a contributor to the prevailing patriarchal discourse on the fashioning of the Muslim gentlewoman. Within a couple of years, in the process of becoming a radical activist disaffiliating from middle-class social concerns, he was to question and reject this position. Other sensitive topics discussed were Christian Anglicist and Hindu revivalist prejudices against Muslims and Islam. The plight of wealthy tenant-farmers (jotedars) and peasants (rayats) at the hands of the predominantly Hindu landlords also found a space in poems and literary pieces and also in advertisements for agricultural services and commodities offered by mostly Muslim entrepreneurs and aimed at potential buyers and consumers of the Muslim middle class who read these periodicals. This bred a sense of incipient competition with and contestation of the socio-economic power of the Hindu propertied elements.38 A critique of the use by mainstream nationalism of Orientalist concepts hostile to Muslims and of Hindu revivalist symbols was also advanced through these journals. Though primarily structured to promote the social interests and shape the identity-thinking of the Bengali Muslim middle classes, this critical perspective had not evolved into an outright rejection of nationalism. Repeated attempts were made to pressure the nationalist leaders, who came from Hindu upper-caste backgrounds, into accepting Muslims as equals.39 The underlying notion of community advancement was not without contradictions stemming from overlapping identitystructures and loyalties. An article published in 1920 in Moslem Bharat (Muslim India),40 when Muzaffar was closely associated with the journal, tried to combine socialist ideas with community development, nationalism and freedom of the individual. The article did not really succeed in conveying any central ideological position. An article by Muzaffar on a Persian Sufi published during the same year in the Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika stressed the saints stimulation of freethinking, and argued that Islamic orthodoxy had been unable to appreciate this aspect.41 This reformist position was not dissimilar to a bourgeois humanist critique of religion developing among a section of the liberal Bengali Muslim
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intelligentsia.42 This particular strand of thinking remained weak and was indicative of a lack of political direction at the heart of community-oriented concerns: disquiet with the idea of a closed community as well as the social need to identify with it. Muzaffars engagement with Bengali Muslim liberal reformism proved to be brief. The pronouncements on gender and community in the essays he wrote during 191819 indicate simultaneous adoption of conservative and liberal positions. None yielded a course of political action acceptable to him. In the post-war radical conjuncture, complex interactions between Muzaffars social location and wider class conflict solved his dilemma. Reformist individualism, with its promise of a possessive bourgeois selfhood, would no longer appeal to him. TIES THAT BIND Though largely conforming to the contemporary preoccupations of the Bengali Muslim intelligentsia, Muzaffar was also feeling increasingly alienated. He was not happy with the title of the Literary Society journal. He had proposed in 1918, that a name free of sectional identity be given. But the Society President felt otherwise and stressed the need to attract a Muslim readership. Muzaffar had gone along with this since we did not wish to lose our old President. However two years later, he chose to oppose such a suggestion (to stay with clear Muslim identification), made by his then employer and leading Bengali Muslim politician, A. K. Fazlul Haq. Those at the fringes of these societies were being drawn into radical currents unleashed by the Russian Revolution of 1917. This process coincided with and also may have contributed to his gradual loss of faith in the leading figures of the community, especially in their social and political judgements. His correspondence with the poet Kazi Nazrul Islam between 1918 and 1919, and their eventual meeting in 1920, can be taken as a case in point. Nazrul had volunteered in the colonial army and become steadily politicized along anti-colonial lines during his stay in the North West Frontier Province of British India. This geographic zone, a source of alarm to the colonial state, was officially viewed as a dangerous meeting-point of Bolshevism and panIslam. News of the Bolshevik victory had reached Nazrul and he felt inspired to write a story, Byathar Dan (The Gift of Pain), published by Muzaffar in the Literary Society journal in early 1920. To avoid police censorship, Muzaffar changed Nazruls explicit and eulogistic references to the Red Army, even though he was impressed by its sentiments.43 Pabitra Gangopadhyay, a writer from Hindu middle-class background who met Muzaffar in 1919 and became his friend for life, was struck by Muzaffars inclination to oppose authoritarian figures. Their social situations were similar. Like Muzaffar, Gangopadhyay had been dependent, as a struggling lower middle-class writer, on the leading lights of Hindu literary circles. He too had remained silent or conformed when areas of disagreement had arisen. One such area was the support among a section
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of Bengali Hindu intellectuals for the British war-effort. Gangopadhyay had also been dismayed by the loyalist positions assumed by the Congress leadership. The two men were part of informal political discussions among younger intellectuals in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution an event they had welcomed precisely because the British government was against it.44 SHADOW OF REVOLUTION
Fragments of radical ideas could be often glimpsed in their intellectual milieu. These ideas, especially the revolutionary mood they conveyed, may have directly and indirectly encouraged the anti-authoritarian positions beginning to be taken by marginalized figures who could not agree with their elders and betters. Marx and Marxism were making their presence felt in Muzaffars cultural world from pre-war days. In 1912, the Bengali and English versions of Muzaffar Ahmads article A Successful Musalman Student were published in Prabashi and its sister organ, Modern Review. The same year Modern Review printed an article on Karl Marx by the nationalist revolutionary, Lala Hardayal.45 Censored images of revolutionary Russia were also seeping in during the closing years of the war, preparing the ground for a more serious engagement of the intelligentsia with socialism. A British film on the February Revolution, celebrating the fall of Czardom and establishment of liberal democracy, was released for general viewing in Calcutta during April 1917. From October onwards, the revolutionary upheavals came to be condemned in the European newspapers, especially The Statesman, the voice of colonial capital.46 Sensational accounts based on descriptions by western journalists were also in circulation.47 Muzaffar himself was to notice a tract on socialism, written in Hindi, in 1919.48 Prabashi was the first journal to show enthusiasm about the revolutionary events in Russia in 1917. In 1918 other Bengali journals edited by members of the Hindu intelligentsia also started displaying a positive attitude towards the Bolsheviks.49 It is difficult to pin down the extent to which these ideas influenced men like Muzaffar. However, these journals were read and many of the articles published in them were reproduced in Bengali Muslim literary magazines. Muzaffars direct links with Prabashi are also a matter of record. DEROOTED COLLECTIVES The lingering local patriotism of Muzaffars earliest writings in the urban environment acted as a source of divergence from an exclusivist identity. It was linked with ideas of self-improvement, implying a search for capitalist modernity by the rural intelligentsia. The high praise for academic merit in A Successful Musalman Student, written while Muzaffar still lived in the countryside, reflected this aspiration. Since the avenues of
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self-improvementwere restricted in Sandwip and Noakhali, those who had the potential to emerge as its ideological architects had no option but to move to the city, the showcase of colonial capital. Local patriotism and the logic of self-improvement in such a context could be read as manifestations of proto-capitalist thinking. The logic of agrarian improvement and improvement literature represented an ethic of profit, productivity and property.50 They embodied a set of values shared by Hindu and Muslim respectable folk, and arguably by the impoverished as well as rural proprietors. The need to associate with people from a similar background led Muzaffar to develop links with some students from Noakhali and with lower-class Muslim sailors from Sandwip. His associate in the Bengali Muslim Literary Society, poet Golam Mostafa, was in 1916 the assistant secretary of Noakhali Sammilani (Noakhali Union), which had been formed by some Noakhali expatriates in Calcutta as early as 1905. Mahendrakumar Ghosh, a youth from a prominent Bengali Hindu landed family, was the secretary of this association. He displayed socially egalitarian concerns and in 1916 had started the monthly periodical, Noakhali. The journal gave space to Hindu and Muslim writers, mostly students and other young people, who came from the district. The first issue began with an introductory poem by Muzaffar Ahmad, Abahan (Exhortation), which glorified the history of the district.51 Muzaffar also attempted to establish a school in his native Sandwip, and sought to secure official recognition and funds for the project.52 In a more immediate sense, contacts based on regional affiliations signalled cravings which could not be met within an exclusively Bengali Muslim middle-class environment. These associations were primarily born from a sense of district affiliation and regional loyalty. But, as social formations, they also contained the roots of another form of identitythinking which would, in a few years time, take Muzaffar elsewhere. This was being generated inside the milieu itself where the more sensitive segments responded to pressures from below and expressed social dissent along egalitarian lines. As if to indicate this, Noakhalis opening poem, an exercise in local patriotism, was followed by an article from the editor criticizing the government for setting up the Benaras Hindu University. He argued that this step could only strengthen Hindu high-caste tyranny, aid those who profit from religion-as-business and undermine the educational drive necessary to improve the condition of low-caste labourers and peasants.53 These and other anti-hierarchical and anti-authoritarian views indicated the emergence of a class fraction54 among younger members of the intelligentsia. These intellectuals were being drawn into social maelstroms challenging their own class origins. For some this led to a return to paternalistic compassionate protectionism, or a disillusioned conformity or opportunistic surrender after a period of dissent. For others it was a radical departure prompting ideological transition.
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FREQUENT VISITOR TO THE CALCUTTA DOCKS Regional affiliations and overlapping identifications were also pulling Muzaffar towards the direction of workers. Muzaffar had known workingclass segments in the Calcutta dock area since 1910s. For a brief period during the summer of 1915 he had taught at a madrasa in the port area of Kidderpore,. Since his native island, Sandwip, supplied a huge number of seamen, he had got to know them. His initial aim may have been to keep abreast of news from home. It had developed into a concern over the conditions in which these sailors found themselves.55 From police reports on post-war trade-unionism in the docks, it seems that the majority of seamen, who came from the ranks of impoverished Bengali Muslims of Chittagong and Noakhali in Eastern Bengal, depended for work and accommodation on brokers with underworld connections. These brokers subjected them to extreme exploitation, appropriating the bulk of their wages. The shipping companies in turn tacitly encouraged the brokers, whose control of the workforce weakened the seamens collective bargaining power.56 Expropriation and abuse encouraged the rise of trade-unions in the port area. The sailors fought the shipping companies and the brokers by forming an organization in 1918 and subsequently through strikes to achieve better working conditions and wages.57 Muslims constituted three-quarters of the population in the Calcutta Port,58 which played a crucial role in the British war-effort. The Port had been developed as one of the most capital-intensive zones of the city. Established in the late eighteenth century, it was the indispensable organ of surplus extraction from the colony. With the establishment of a state-ofthe-art dock at Kidderpore in 1892, its profitability increased rapidly. It was directly connected by water and rail to the rising industrial complex on the Hooghly embankment and the import jetties. An electric tram service linked it to the commercial centre making it a modern marvel. Its wharves and sheds were lit by electricity at a time when the main thoroughfares of Calcutta were still lit by gas. Within eight years of its construction, this most profitable of all colonial public facilities in Calcutta was being prepared for further improvement. A contemporary account lauded this project and commented upon the stupendous strides with which the port of Calcutta has reached, in the last 200 years, its present position as emporium of trade of the first magnitude under the beneficent, all powerful and worldpervading protection of the Union Jack, in spite of the ceaseless freaks of a treacherous river.59 But the beneficent, all powerful and world-pervading protection of the Union Jack was not extended to the workers of the Port area who kept this gigantic enterprise running. Kidderpore was one of the poorest wards with abysmal living standards. It had the worst public-health record in Calcutta, a product and illustration of the desperate material conditions. The major concern to the colonial authorities was its unplanned growth,60
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interpreted as a hindrance to order and profit. They ignored the population living under the constant shadow of death. Throughout the second decade of the twentieth century, including the war years and their immediate aftermath, Kidderpore remained the most unhealthy ward in the city. It had the highest death rate in Calcutta. The administrative report of the Calcutta Corporation (191213) blamed the insanitary condition in the docks describing it as a place swarming with the flies. Not unexpectedly, then, Kidderpores dubious gift to the city was the influenza pandemic. Alongside plague and smallpox, it struck Calcutta in 1918. A global pandemic during the closing year of the First World War, influenza reached the city by sea. It infected Kidderpore, which recorded the citys highest mortality rate, and from there spread rapidly.61 Caught in the web of exploitation, poverty and pestilence, the ward proved to be one of the liveliest centres of labour protest in the city during 192021,62 a period when Muzaffar was turning towards labour politics and socialism. Muzaffar already knew the community of sailors and some of their leaders, members of the Urdu and Bengali-speaking Muslim intelligentsia, through the overlapping of literary and political circles.63 The majority of those affected by the influenza pandemic lived in municipal wards dominated by the working class. Peace in Europe meant little to an ordinary inhabitant of Calcutta in 1918. Acute war-induced scarcity thrust the majority of its residents into hardship and made the disease-ridden city desperate. Prices of essential commodities such as rice, wheat, salt, cooking oil and cloth had shot up, making life difficult even for middle-class householders.64 Violence flared easily in this environment. Business firms were attacked and their warehouses looted. An irate Muslim mob accused them of hoarding and causing an artificial cloth-famine. The cloth riot, begun by the unemployed or semi-employed Urdu-speaking Muslim poor and directed against a section of non-Bengali Hindu rich, reflected the antagonistic divisions based on ethno-linguistic, class and religious identities among the diasporic communities of the city.65 The following year the very same segments would join forces against colonialism, by then identified as the primary cause of hardship, and indicate the social convergence of sectional and nationalist mass mobilizations in an altered political context.66 RESHUFFLE AND TRANSITION Exposure to working-class conditions and hardships during and immediately after the war brought Muzaffar closer to direct politics. From a muted distaste towards colonial authority, he was entering into a zone of confrontational activism. He moved towards outright opposition to the rule of colonial capital and that brought with it sharp divergences from the politics of mainstream anti-colonial nationalism and from the claims of exclusivist religious and ethno-linguistic identities. 1919 was a turning
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point in Muzaffars career. His social milieu was being increasingly drawn into the post-war anti-colonial upsurge. Yet he was reluctant to commit himself to any of the existing political options. Throughout the year, a debate raged within him about whether to remain a full-time literary activist or to become involved in politics. In 1920, he decided in favour of anti-colonial politics and take up political journalism. This in turn involved him in the working-class movements being directed against both European and Indian factory-owners in and around Calcutta. These movements generated an interest in socialist literature and in 1921, the intention of forming a communist organization. The social networks he had forged during the war years continued to offer him a level of support. Kazi Imdadul Haq, for instance, despite being a government employee, ignored the possible repercussions, including the threat of police harassment, and sent food to Muzaffar when the latter was in jail as the sole State Prisoner in Bengal during 1923. The familiar lanes, by-lanes, lodging houses and addresses in and around College Street were the principal means of escaping police attention. Wartime visitors to the city later became political colleagues J. W. Johnstone, a British soldier stationed in wartime Calcutta, returned to the city as a representative of the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA) and the Communist International during 1928.67 Muzaffar Ahmad had left behind a rural existence where communal, nationalist and ethno-linguistic components of social identity had yet to assume a coherent political focus. In the city, Muzaffars political position attained sharper contours. This process was mediated by his urban social milieu, and by the political trends which touched the Calcutta intelligentsia during the First World War. In a semi-segregated colonial city which during the war years endured material scarcity, state repression and racist violence, self-awareness as a racialized subject could give shape to an intense and desperate social hostility towards colonialism. Intersecting experiences in the city, therefore, prepared the ground for a more intensive process of politicization in the years that immediately followed. The war years provided an ideological environment in which alienation from the policies of the colonial state acted, for a while, as a bridge between mainstream nationalism dominated by the Hindu proprietorial classes and the Muslim intelligentsia. Nowhere were the multiple layers of Muslim intellectual thought more apparent than in the cultural writings of the period, simultaneously revealing identityformation and identity-crisis. In the post-war period anti-imperialist mass upsurge and labour militancy, in his immediate environment and beyond, facilitated a dialectical interplay between the two which opened up various ideological options before the Muslim intellectuals, including the socialist alternative.
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CONCLUSIONS In the immediate post-war period (191921) Muzaffars fully-fledged entry into political journalism played a key role in his political transformation along leftist lines. This was shaped by the working-class upsurge in Calcutta and by the impact on Muzaffar and some of his contemporaries of socialist ideas following the success of the Russian Revolution. The reshuffling and mutations of self which gave rise to his new political identity were rooted in this context. It was related to a complex process of disaffiliation from existing structures of anti-colonial politics and was underlined by a break with the outlook of mainstream leaders and the dominant ideologies they represented. The first socialist nucleus in Calcutta, with Muzaffar as the principal organizer, emerged in 1922. His links with the Third Communist International, circulation of banned political literature and communications with other anti-colonial radicals led to his arrest in 1923 and the following year he faced trial in the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case. Muzaffar was released in 1925 and returned to Calcutta early in 1926 to join the first socialist organization in Bengal, contributing to its growth and activities. The political development of Muzaffar Ahmad between 1913 and 1929 coincided with a significant phase in the social and political history of India and the world. These years also connect two crisis-points in the history of imperialism and capitalism: 1913, the eve of the First World War, and 1929, the year of the Wall Street Crash which set off the Great Depression. They enclose a period within which socialist ideas and communist activity became politically familiar in different parts of the globe. The success of the Bolshevik Revolution and the formation of the Third Communist International directly boosted these currents. Socialism came to be perceived by many in the colonizing and colonized countries as a viable alternative and a solution to the problems posed by capitalism and imperialism in the midst of economic crisis and war. A radicalization of political culture could be felt among the intelligentsia in various urban centres of the world from Cairo to Shanghai. Calcutta was no exception. Many socially alienated, economically distressed and politically dissatisfied urban intellectuals stood at the crossroads of established and radical identity-formations. Among them, there was a small fraction informed by social radicalism from below and the leftward turn in literary and cultural fields. They were disaffiliating themselves from the more established political routes open to those from their social background to combat colonialism and affiliating themselves with a more radical vision of decolonization. 1913 was the year of Muzaffars migration to Calcutta. 1929 marked the end of a phase in his political career as a pioneer of the communist movement as it had emerged in Bengal and India of the 1920s. It was also the year when leading communists were arrested and then tried in the
Fig. 4. Portrait of the Meerut prisoners whose challenge against conspiracy convictions lasted from 1929 to 1933. Back page of pamphlet by Clemens Dutt, Conspiracy Against the King, published by The National Meerut Prisoners Defence Committee, 23 Great Ormond Street, London, June 1930. Back row (left to right): K. N. Sehgal, S. S. Josh, H. L. Hutchinson, Shaukat Usmani, B. F. Bradley, A. Prasad, P. Spratt, G. Adhikari. Middle row: R. R. Mitra, Gopen Chakravarti, Kishori Lal Ghosh, L. R. Kadam, D. R. Thengdi, Gouri Shankar, S. Bannerjee, K. N. Joglekar, P. C. Joshi, Muzaffar Ahmad. Front Row: M. G. Desai, D. Goswami, R. S. Nimbkar, S. S. Mirajkar, S. A. Dange, S. V. Ghate, Gopal Basak.
Courtesy of the Working Class Movement Library. Original Copyright-holder not known.
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Meerut Conspiracy Case, the longest judicial proceedings against political opponents mounted by the state in British India. Muzaffar Ahmad was chief among those accused at Meerut, a factor which enhanced the prestige of the Bengal communists in the 1930s and influenced their rapid growth. The 1930s also saw the recruitment of a considerable section of the Hindu middle-class youth, disenchanted with the waning radicalism of militant revolutionary politics, and a widening communist influence among peasants and workers. By 1947, the CPI had emerged as the third largest political formation in British India. The advance was met with setbacks, however, for 1947, the year of Indian independence, was marked by the bloodbath and displacements which accompanied the partition of the country. Bengal was divided, signifying the triumph of dominant identityformations. The following year, the CPI was banned in parts of India and Muzaffar was reimprisoned. In later years, he organized primarily in West Bengal, and Calcutta continued to be his base. As a senior CPI central committee member in 1964, he advocated the formation of a new communist organization independent of Moscow and Peking. He faced incarceration for the last time during the same decade when already in his seventies, and died a few years later in 1973.68 During the second decade of the century, as we have seen, Muzaffar had found employment as a private tutor and lived in the house of a nineteenthcentury Urdu writer, the late Munshi Alimuddin. Whenever the spectre of destitution visited him in the early 1920s, Muzaffar sought asylum in this house. Towards the end of his life this indirect association was rekindled by a strange coincidence. The Bengal headquarters of Muzaffars party came to be located on a street named after Alimuddin. The office was later moved to a new building on the same street, which was posthumously named after Muzaffar. It continues to be the headquarters of a party which emerged out of the divisions within the communist left and has hegemonized politics in West Bengal since 1977. Muzaffar came to the city to become a writer, and so in some sense follow in Munshi Alimuddins footsteps, but migration embroiled him in experiences and a new sense of identity which took him away from his original goal. Muzaffar Ahmad had wished to devote himself to thoughtful essays on the glories of Islamic culture. He gradually involved himself in political activities instead. His political experiences as a marginalized figure on the fringes of society made him focus on the larger anti-colonial struggle. They also made him support the confused political ideology of Bengali middle-class Muslims who were unable to separate themselves from either sectional or ethno-linguistic identities. The contradictions bred by these diverging and converging forms of political consciousness, combined with the unabashed hatred of Hindu chauvinists towards all aspects of Islam and Muslims, made Muzaffar reject the ethos of cultural nationalism, dominated by a Hindu Bengali intelligentsia steeped in Hindu imagery. Opposition to British rule and friendship with non-communal, socially marginalized
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Bengali Hindu middle-class intellectuals led him to oppose the orthodox elements within the so-called community and favour a united opposition to imperialism. He began to harbour doubts about the claims of Muslim leaders who insisted that they represented the interests of all Muslims, and also of nationalist leaders from high-caste Hindu property-owning backgrounds who claimed to represent all Indians. Involvement in the militant labour politics which shook Calcutta and its suburbs in 192021, a simultaneous switch to radical journalism which increasingly made him write about the political movements of workers and peasants, and a growing interest in Marxian socialism and workers power mediated by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, further weakened his attachment to a Bengali Muslim middle-class identity caught between sectional, ethno-linguistic and nationalist political considerations. City life had encouraged him towards new structures of social interdependence absent in the village. In the complex web of urban struggles, perceptions of the self and society were changing. Communitarian values, imbibed through Islamic congregationist religious practice as well as heterodox socio-literary collectivities, were being reconfigured and transformed to arrive at a social understanding and political recognition of transcommunal oppressions. This meant going beyond the community. In 1919, Muzaffar Ahmad was on the verge of an ideological transition. By reshuffling his political consciousness, the war years had prepared the ground for this shift towards radicalization. This fraction Muzaffar represented increased in size during the second half of the 1920s with the inclusion of sections of the Hindu Bengali intelligentsia, politically alienated from different strands of nationalism. However, throughout the 1920s, the actual size of the left in Bengal remained very small. The first socialist organization in Bengal, led by the communists, made its presence felt in the late 1920s primarily among workers in the industrial suburbs of Calcutta. The failure to expand among the rural poor indicated the restricted reach of left activism. Plainly, the communists and socialists could not overcome the greater political appeal enjoyed by nationalist and communal formations. In his later autobiographical writings, Muzaffar explored reasons for the fragility of a class-based movement at this time, facing state repression, the hostility of more established political formations and hampered by its own inner contradictions. During the 1930s many disenchanted younger members of the revolutionary terrorist circles turned to Marxism while in prison. Their transition was facilitated by a material process: the shedding of all social links with landed property by a sizeable section of the Hindu bhadralok (that is, the educated middle class) who, it has been claimed, became dependent on professions from this period.69 Their entry coincided with the widening of the CPI mass base among workers and peasants. The increase in the size of the organization in turn led to Muzaffars eclipse as the central figure of the communist movement in Bengal.
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Muzaffar and other early communists journeyed from obscurity in the political wilderness to become leftist veterans who paved the way for the emergence of a mass movement in colonial and post-independence India. This article has sought to explain the particular routes Muzaffar Ahmad explored before he turned towards left radicalism. In May 1928 when Muzaffar Ahmad was suffering from failing health and mental worries, a colleague wrote to him: Biography of . . . pioneers is the history of trials and vicissitudes. It is only the opportunistic scalp that thrives under the Raj of Capital . . . Have patience and confidence . . . better days are coming.70 Despite the consolation offered, the trials and vicissitudes continued to haunt Muzaffar. They were not necessarily replaced by better days. Still, he remained committed to life which is lived only once and remarked towards the end of his life: My attachment to atheist materialism increases each day. It is said, as people grow older they become increasingly inclined towards the spirit. In my case, I notice the very opposite. With each passing year, I am becoming even more attached to [the world of] matter.71 During the years immediately following the First World War, this was only one of his many realizations in a city that remade him. Suchetana Chattopadhyay is Lecturer in History at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. She completed her doctoral dissertation on Muzaffar Ahmad and the early socialist movement in Calcutta during the 1910s and the 1920s at SOAS, University of London, in 2005. Besides the histories of communism and socialism, her research interests also include urban social history, working-class history, colonial surveillance and imperial masculinity.
NOTES AND REFERENCES This article cites primary sources collected from colonial administrative and surveillance documents. IB stands for Intelligence Branch records of the Bengal Police. See footnotes for the full references for Muzaffar Ahmads writings in contemporary Bengali journals (B stands for Bengali periodicals in the notes below) and his autobiographical accounts, Samakaler Katha (Story of My Times), Kazi Nazrul Islam: Smritikatha (Kazi Nazrul Islam: Reminiscences) and Amar Jiban o Bharater Communist Party (My Life and the Communist Party of India), which the text heavily draws upon. These writings provide clues to and descriptions of his thinking during his early years as a migrant in the city. Memoirs by contemporaries are also cited to grasp the thoughts and actions of a segment of the Bengali intelligentsia during the war. I am indebted to Professor Peter Robb and to Anna Davin, Andrew Whitehead and other editors of History Workshop Journal for their comments on the draft which paved the way for this article. 1 The phrase reshuffling of the self can be found in Carl E. Schorske, Introduction, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture, New York, 1981, p. xviii.
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2 Sumit Sarkar, The City Imagined: Calcutta of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, and Renaissance and Kaliyuga: Time, Myth and History in Colonial Bengal, in Writing Social History, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 169, 190; Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 19321947, Delhi, 1995, pp. 812. This social logic which steered the Hindu landed gentry toward colonial education and white-collar jobs could extend to Muslim landed families as well. For a detailed study, see Mohammad Shah, In Search of an Identity: Bengali Muslims 18801940, Calcutta, 1996. 3 See Imperial Gazetteer of India, Eastern Bengal and Assam, Calcutta, 1909; J. E. Webster, Eastern Bengal and Assam District Gazetteers, Noakhali, Allahabad, 1911; W. H. Thompson, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operations in the District of Noakhali 1914 to 1919, Calcutta, 1920; Rajkumar Chakraborty and Anangomohan Das, Sandwiper Itihas (History of Sandwip), Calcutta, Bengali periodicxals (henceforth B) 1330/ 192324. Also Muzaffar Ahmad, Samakaler Katha (Story of My Times), 1963, Fourth Edition, 1996, pp. 67. 4 Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Wealth and Work in Calcutta 18601921, in Calcutta: the Living City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhury, Vol. 1, Calcutta, 1995, p. 216. 5 Report of the Municipal Administration of Calcutta 191213, Corporation of Calcutta. For the social impact of nocturnal illumination on metropolitan urban existence, see Joachim Schlor, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 18401930, London, 1998, pp. 589. 6 Suranjan Das, The Politics of Agitation: Calcutta 19121947, in Calcutta: the Living City, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Vol. 2, Calcutta, 1995, p. 16. 7 Rajat Ray, Urban Roots of Indian Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interests in Calcutta City Politics, 18751939 Delhi, 1979, pp. 46. 8 Report of the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, 191213. 9 Report of the Municipal Administration of Calcutta, 191213. 10 Report on Native Newspapers, 1914. 11 Report on Native Newspapers, 191416. For a dissection of the apocalyptic mood which characterized major cities, such as New York, on the eve of the First World War, see Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales, New York, 2002, pp. 7, 9. The ruptured spleen syndrome (euphemism for racist homicide of native domestic servants) was also prevalent in other parts of the Empire. For a survey of the African colonies, see Jock McCulloch, Empire and Violence, 19001939, in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine, Oxford, 2004. Sumit Sarkar employs the phrase protectionist compassion in Vidyasagar and Brahmanical Society, in Writing Social History, p. 280. 12 Das, The Politics of Agitation, p. 17; John H. Broomfield, Elite Conflict in a Plural Society, Berkeley, 1968, pp. 14, 625, 1135, 11722, 1625; Kenneth McPherson, Muslim Microcosm: Calcutta 1918 to 1935, Wiesbaden, 1974, pp. 119, 2054; Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 19041924, London, 1995, p. 79. 13 John Berwick, Chatra Samaj: the Social and Political Significance of the Student Community in Bengal c.18701922, Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Sydney, 1986, p. 356; David M. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left: Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 19051942, Calcutta, 1975, pp. 67. 14 Ahmad, Amar Jiban o Bharater Communist Party (My Life and the Communist Party of India), Calcutta, 1969, 5th edn, 1996, p. 24. 15 Berwick, Chatra Samaj, pp. 3056, 3089, 352, 384; Ajitkumar Basu, Kolikatar Rajpath, Samaje o Sanskritite (Streets of Calcutta, In Society and Culture), Calcutta, 1996, pp. 339, 342, 3467; Debasis Bose, College Street, in Calcutta: the Living City, ed. Chaudhury, vol. 2, p. 219. 16 Report on Native Newspapers, 191415. For a treatment of criminality in the city, see Debraj Bhattacharya, Kolkata Underworld in the Early 20th Century, Economic and Political Weekly, 38: 38, 2004. 17 Berwick, Chatra Samaj, pp. 217, 24653, 384; Chandiprasad Sarkar, The Bengali Muslim:, a Study in their Politicization (19121929), Calcutta, 1991, pp. 412; Muzaffar Ahmad, Kazi Nazrul Islam: Smritikatha (Kazi Nazrul Islam: Reminiscences), Calcutta, 1965, 9th edn, 1998, pp. 1, 16; Report on Native Newspapers, 1916. McPherson, Muslim Microcosm, p. 4; Census of India, 1911, vol. 6, Calcutta I. According to the 1911 Census women constituted 15% of the city population. Among them one-fourth worked at various occupations and of these a quarter were prostitutes. 18 Berwick, Chatra Samaj, pp. 249, 253; Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 201.
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19 Berwick, Chatra Samaj, pp. 135, 2423, 249; Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, p. 8. 20 Berwick, Chatra Samaj, pp. 24950; Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 20, 256; Basu, Kolikatar Rajpath, pp. 3467. 21 Berwick, Chatra Samaj, pp. 23940, 3056; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism, pp. 1011; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 3912. 22 Muzaffar Ahmad, Myself and the Communist Party of India 19201929, Calcutta, 1970, p. 12; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 278 (italics mine). The political dimensions of the song are discussed in Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, Delhi, 2001, pp. 17681. Also Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, Bande Mataram: the Biography of a Song, Delhi, 2003. 23 This aspect is discussed later. 24 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 1923; Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 12; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 358. 25 For a recent discussion on Gemeinschaft, Gesellschaft and Indian nationalism, see Rajat Kanta Ray, Nationalism, Modernity and Civil Society: the Subalternist Critique and After, Calcutta, 2007. 26 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 1923. 27 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 1923; Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp.12; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 358. 28 Census of India, 1911, vol. 6, Calcutta I. 29 Report on Native Newspapers, 19141916; McPherson, Muslim Microcosm, pp. 29, 30, 41. 30 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, pp. 23, 84; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, p. 30. 31 Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 22, 26, 232; Bir, Al-Eslam 1: 7, B 1322/1916. 32 Samiti Sangbad (Society News), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 3, B 1326/1919; Samiti Sangbad (Society News), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 4, B 1326/1919; Sangkalan (Compilation), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 3, B 1326/1919; Sangkalan (Compilation) 2: 4, B 1326/1919; Sangkalan (Compilation), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 3: 1, B 1327/1920; Daktar Husayan (Dr Husayan), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 3: 1, B 1327/1920. 33 Saogat 1: 5, B 1325/1919. 34 Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 1: 1, B 1325/1918; also Anisuzzaman, Muslim Banglar Samayik Patrika (List of Bengali Muslim Periodicals), Dhaka, 1969, pp. 2014. 35 Anisuzzaman, Muslim Banglar Samayik Patrika, pp. 2034; Urdu Bhasha o Bangali Musalman, Al-Eslam, Sraban, B 1324/1917; Chandiprasad Sarkar, The Bengali Muslims: a Study in their Politicization, pp. 667. 36 Anisuzzaman, Muslim Banglar Samayik Patrika, pp. 20156. 37 Patrer Uttar (Reply to Sudhakanto Raychoudhury), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2: 4, B1326/1919; Narir Mulya o Islamer Jer-alochona (The continuing discussion on the status of women and Islam), Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 3: 1, B1327/1920. 38 Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 1: 2, B 1325/1918; Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 2, 4, B 1326/1919; Saogat 1: 1, B 1325/1919. 39 Al-Eslam, 3 May 19155 May 1916; Saogat 1: 1, B 1325/1919. 40 Moslem Bharat, Asvin, B 1327/1920. 41 Imam Al-Ghazzali, Bangiya Musalman Sahitya Patrika 1: 2, B1325/1918. 42 Tanzeen M. Murshid, The Sacred and the Secular: Bengal Muslim Discourses 18711977 Calcutta, 1995, pp. 1301. 43 Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 12, 267, 10510. 44 Pabitra Gangopadhyay, Chalaman Jiban (Journey through Life), Calcutta, 1994, pp. 667, 93, 100, 205. 45 Modern Review 11: 3, March 1912. In December 1912 Muzaffar Ahmads article A Successful Musalman Student appeared in Modern Review. Its Bengali version was printed in Prabashi. 46 Satis Pakrasi, Agnijuger Katha (The Burning Times), Calcutta, 3rd edn, 1982, pp. 105, 109. 47 Introduction, Bangalir Samyabad Charcha (Communist Thinking in Bengal), ed. Sipra Sarkar and Anamitra Das, Calcutta, 1998; Sarojnath Ghosh, Rusiyar Pralay, Calcutta, 1920. 48 Ahmad, Smritikatha, p. 110. 49 Introduction, Bangalir Samyabad Charcha, ed. Sarkar and Das.
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50 Ellen Meiksins Wood, Modernity, Postmodernity or Capitalism?, in Capitalism and the Information Age: the Political Economy of the Global Communication Revolution, ed. Robert W. McChesney, Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, Kharagpur, 2001, p. 40. Meiksins Wood argues that the model of agrarian capitalism which emerged in England found expression in a distinctive ideology of improvement. For recent treatments of improvement ideology among Muslim agrarian populations of East Bengal, see Pradip Kumar Datta, Muslim Peasant Improvement, Pir Abu Bakr and the Formation of Communalized Islam, in Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth Century Bengal, Delhi, 1999, pp. 64108; also Sumit Sarkar, Two Muslim Tracts for Peasants: Bengal 19091910, Beyond Nationalist Frames: Relocating Postmodernism, Hindutva, History, Delhi, 2002, pp. 96111. 51 Noakhali 1: 1, B 1322/1916; Ahmad, Amar Jiban, p. 83; Ahmad, Smritikatha, p. 40. 52 Hassan Mohammad, Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad O Banglar Communist Andolan (Comrade Muzaffar Ahmad and the Communist Movement in Bengal), Chattagram, 1989, p. 99. 53 Mahendrakumar Ghosh, Katha O Karjyo (Word and Deed), Noakhali 1: 2, B 1323/ 1916. 54 The Bloomsbury Fraction, in Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture, London, 1980. Williams describes avant-garde intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Circle as a fraction, isolated from the general directions of the upper classes. 55 Ahmad, Amar Jiban, p. 83. 56 IB 294 A/20 (133/1920); IB 294/20 (134/1920); Ray, Urban Roots, p. 96. 57 IB 294 A/20 (133/1920); IB 294/20 (134/1920). 58 Census of India, 1921, vol. 4, part 1. 59 A. K. Roy, A Short History of Calcutta: Town and Suburbs, Census of India, vol. 7, part 1, Calcutta 1901, p. 130. For a detailed study of the Calcutta Ports profitability and growth during the nineteenth century see Prajnananda Banerjee, Calcutta and Its Hinterland, 18331900, Calcutta, 1975, pp. 2469. 60 E. P. Richards, C.I.T. Report on the Condition, Improvement and Town Planning of Calcutta and Contiguous Areas, Hertfordshire, 1914, pp. 1011, quoted in Ray, Urban Roots, p. 5. 61 Report on Municipal Administration of Calcutta for the Year 191819. 62 Report of the Committee on Industrial Unrest, 1921, pp. 1,194265. 63 Ahmad, Samakaler Katha, p. 20; Ahmad, Smritikatha, pp. 2, 47. 64 McPherson, Muslim Microcosm, pp. 33, 37. He points out that by early 1918, prices had risen by 78% but wages had remained static since 1914 (p. 35). 65 Broomfield, Elite Conflict, p. 122; Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal 19051947, New Delhi, 1993, pp. 61, 67. 66 Sarkar, Modern India, p. 194. 67 Ahmad, Amar Jiban, pp. 38, 83, 1134, 2636, 268, 2923, 460. 68 For a biographical account, see Mortuza Khaled, A Study in Leadership: Muzaffar Ahmad and the Communist Movement in Bengal, Calcutta, 2001. 69 For discussions on the ideological shift from revolutionary nationalism to communism, see Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left. Partha Chatterjee has briefly pointed out the changing relationship between the Hindu Bengali intelligentsia and landed property in Bengal 19201947: the Land Question, Calcutta, 1984. 70 IB file number censored. 71 Ganashakti (Peoples Power), Muzaffar Ahmad Janmoshatobarsho Sankhya (Muzaffar Ahmad Birth Centenary Edition), Calcutta, 1989, pp. 119, 230.

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