Cultivating Land, Self, and Community Among Muslims in Late Colonial Bengal
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University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2013 Labors of Representation: Cultivating Land, Self, and Community Among Muslims in Late Colonial Bengal Ananya Dasgupta University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Asian Studies Commons, History Commons, and the South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons Recommended Citation Dasgupta, Ananya, "Labors of Representation: Cultivating Land, Self, and Community Among Muslims in Late Colonial Bengal" (2013). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 849. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/849 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/849 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Labors of Representation: Cultivating Land, Self, and Community Among Muslims in Late Colonial Bengal Abstract LABORS OF REPRESENTATION: CULTIVATING LAND, SELF, AND COMMUNITY AMONG MUSLIMS IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL Ananya Dasgupta Lisa Mitchell This dissertation studies how the specificity of regional practices of cultural productions, ideological strands, forms and practices of civil associations, and styles of literary expressions among Muslims inflected the Pakistan movement in late colonial Bengal. Using wide-ranging sources that include vernacular religious tracts, the popular genre of Muslim improvement texts, pamphlets of tenant-peasant associations, journals, diaries, autobiographies, and literary archives, I trace historical transformations in practices and ideas about religion and political representation among the Muslims of Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century to the late colonial period. In so doing, I examine key shifts in Islamic theological concepts, Muslim forms of civil associations, social movements and Muslim literary cultures to argue that by the inter-war period (in the 1920s and 1930s) these altered the meaning of being Muslim, in the context of Bengal, in very critical ways by, at one level, linking up notions of cultivation of self and community to ideas of cultivating land, thus valorizing labor as a positive repository of value, while positing sites and actors engaged in the spheres of exchange and circulation as full of deceit and dubiousness, and at another level, by conjoining the meaning of cultivating land and Islamic moral community to the land of Bengal, thereby creating new kinds of claims of ethnic belonging rooted in a regionalism. I show how such transformations were critical in instantiating subjectivities that could inhabit modalities of organized politics, which, in an era of expanding franchise, became available to mobilization and manipulation by political players and parties who championed the primacy of the producer in a claim to politically represent them. Broadly speaking, my dissertation traces the rise of an ideology of labor as the touchstone of Bengali Muslim politics in the late colonial period for our understanding of the conjunction between leftist populism and religious nationalism rooted in a regional identity. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group South Asia Regional Studies First Advisor Lisa Mitchell Keywords Bengal, Cultural History, Muslims in Colonial Bengal, South Asia Subject Categories Asian Studies | History | South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/849 LABORS OF REPRESENTATION: CULTIVATING LAND, SELF, AND COMMUNITY AMONG MUSLIMS IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL Ananya Dasgupta A DISSERTATION in South Asia Regional Studies Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2013 Supervisor of Dissertation Signature -------------------------------- Dr. Lisa Mitchell Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Graduate Group Chairperson Signature ---------------------------------- Dr. Lisa Mitchell Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Dissertation Committee Lisa Mitchell, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Ramya Sreenivasan, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies Daud Ali, Associate Professor, Department of South Asia Studies ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over the course of writing this dissertation I have accumulated countless debts. I am thankful, above all, to my advisor, Lisa Mitchell, for her guidance, constant support, infectious intellectual curiosity and patience. I shall always remain greatly indebted to my committee members, Ramya Sreenivasan and Daud Ali for their generosity. I thank the University of Pennsylvania, which has provided me with grants for fieldwork and writing. Thanks are also due to numerous scholars in Dhaka and Calcutta who exposed me to ideas and material and helped me navigate libraries and archives. Professor Anisuzzaman, Professor Sirajul Islam, Sonia Amin, Aksad Alam, Shantanu Majumdar and Asha Islam deserve special mention. To the librarians and staff of Bangla Academy, Dhaka University Library, Nazrul Institute, Bangladesh National Archives, Bangiya Shahitya Parishad, Jantindramohan Granthasala, and the West Bengal State Archives I remain ever grateful. David Gilmartin, Bodhisattva Kar, Rupa Vishvanath, Ram Rawat, Kathy Hall and Deven Patel have enriched me with their thoughts, comments, and kindnesses. Zoe Beckerman and Jody Chavez have been unfailing in their support. I could not have survived graduate school and much else besides without my friends and comrades. I thank Srinivas, Varuni, Sanjukta, Peter, Rich, Amruta, Erin, Pushkar, Raili, Manjita, Katy, Steve, Sharmadip, Sudan, and Omar for helping me stay sane. From my family – Seema and Anjan Dasgupta, and Sherina and Abu Abbas, I have always received loving and unquestioned support. Finally, I thank Zaheer for being my constant interlocutor and my greatest friend. ii ABSTRACT LABORS OF REPRESENTATION: CULTIVATING LAND, SELF, AND COMMUNITY AMONG MUSLIMS IN LATE COLONIAL BENGAL Ananya Dasgupta Lisa Mitchell This dissertation studies how the specificity of regional practices of cultural productions, ideological strands, forms and practices of civil associations, and styles of literary expressions among Muslims inflected the Pakistan movement in late colonial Bengal. Using wide-ranging sources that include vernacular religious tracts, the popular genre of Muslim improvement texts, pamphlets of tenant-peasant associations, journals, diaries, autobiographies, and literary archives, I trace historical transformations in practices and ideas about religion and political representation among the Muslims of Bengal from the mid-nineteenth century to the late colonial period. In so doing, I examine key shifts in Islamic theological concepts, Muslim forms of civil associations, social movements and Muslim literary cultures to argue that by the inter-war period (in the 1920s and 1930s) these altered the meaning of being Muslim, in the context of Bengal, in very critical ways by, at one level, linking up notions of cultivation of self and community to ideas of cultivating land, thus valorizing labor as a positive repository of value, while positing sites and actors engaged in the spheres of exchange and circulation as full of deceit and dubiousness, and at another level, by conjoining the meaning of cultivating land and Islamic moral community to the land of Bengal, thereby creating new kinds of claims of ethnic belonging rooted in a regionalism. I show how such transformations were critical in instantiating subjectivities that could inhabit modalities of organized politics, which, in an era of expanding franchise, became available to mobilization and manipulation by iii political players and parties who championed the primacy of the producer in a claim to politically represent them. Broadly speaking, my dissertation traces the rise of an ideology of labor as the touchstone of Bengali Muslim politics in the late colonial period for our understanding of the conjunction between leftist populism and religious nationalism rooted in a regional identity. iv CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Table of Contents v Note on Transliteration 1 Introduction 2 Chapter 1: Debt, Riba, and Muslim Self-making in Bengal 28 Introduction 28 Rationalist and Reformist Remedies for the burden of debt 34 The Muslim Improvement Texts: How to prosper in this world and beyond? 41 Conclusion 52 Chapter 2: Changing conceptions of Muslim Political Representation 61 From Patronage to People’s Power 61 The Anjuman: Muslim civil associations and the practice of democracy 78 Conclusion 89 Chapter 3: From Respect to Redistribution: The Hegemony of Praja Identity 91 Early Praja Assertions 91 Religious Legitimacy and Patronage of Raiyat Sabhas 100 Winning over the Bargadar and the Production of Bengali Muslim Identity at a Grass-roots Level 107 Conclusion 127 v Chapter 4: The Cultural Politics of the Pakistan Demand: Islam, Egalitarianism and the Individual in Bengali Muslim Literary Praxis 138 Literary Separatism and Non-sectarian Nationalism: A paradox of Bengali Muslim Culture 138 The Poetics of Samyavad and the Politics of Self-expression 156 Conclusion 176 Conclusion 179 Glossary 184 Bibliography 188 Index 210 vi NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSLITERATION All translations from Bengali are mine, unless otherwise indicated. I have devised and followed my own code of transliteration in this dissertation,