HVK Archives: The 'communal' quirk of Indians
The 'communal' quirk of Indians - The Economic Times
Swagato Ganguly
()
31 October 1996
Title : The `communal' quirk of Indians
Author : Swagato Ganguly
Publication : The Economic Times
Date : October 31, 1996
Now that the Oxford Advanced Learner's dictionary has
come out with an Indian English supplement, I hope it has
an entry for the word 'communal.' The 'C' word got me
into trouble in the US; my audience was not used to
hearing Indian English.
When the Babri Masjid demolition and the subsequent riots
took place, I happened to be at a university in the US.
On being asked to ventilate my views on Indian events by
American friends, I held forth about "communal" beliefs
and "communal" parties, leaving my interlocutors more
puzzled than enlightened.
It was a while before it dawned on me that 'communal' had
for them quite positive connotations, as in being commun-
ity oriented and altruistic.
A quirk of the way the term `communal' is used in Indian
English is that it is seldom held to apply outside Indian
contexts, though it might seem equally relevant to
scenarios such as Serb attacks on Muslim populations in
Bosnia, or race riots and rhetoric about 'Judaeo-Chris-
tian values' in the US. Underlying all these instances
is the declaration of a hostile ethnic or religious
identity.
Anyone looking at Catholic-Protestant relations in Brit-
ish history would be struck by the parallels with contem-
porary Hindu-Muslim relations and sub-continental polit-
ics. Catholics were a minority in Britain but a majority
in neighbouring France, which had attempted to expel its
Protestant population in 1685; the running feud and
frequent wars between England and France for almost two
centuries thereafter was driven by the hostility of these
two religious groups. Until 1829 British Catholics were
not allowed to vote or possess weapons, and were excluded
from all state offices as well as both houses of Parlia-
ment. Thus Britain undoubtedly was a 'communal' state.
Even after the attainment of legal equality in 1829
Catholics were treated as potential traitors, as un-
British; not far from current Hindu majoritarian views
about Muslims in India.
The legacy of bitterness between British Catholics and
Protestants can still be seen in Northern Ireland, but
the Indian Press hardly refers to the trouble there (or
the West Bank or South Africa) as 'communal.' 'Communal'
is treated as applying solely to Indian situations.
Such a convention of usage misleads even as accomplished
a writer as Amitav Ghosh, when in his novel The Shadow
Lines he describes the prelude to a Hindu-Muslim clash as
follows: 'It is this that sets apart the 1000 million
people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the
world - not language, not food, not music - it is the
special quality of loneliness that grows out of the fear
of the war between oneself and one's image in the
mirror.' Try telling that to a resident of Sarajevo, or
Beirut.
The restriction in communalism's range of reference arose
out of a way of thinking that perceived Indian society as
inherently religion driven, compared to Western societies
which are predominantly secular and whose principles of
conflict derive from class. Concern with the economic
class was not an invention of Karl Marx; it was a fairly
widespread obsession with English Victorian intellectuals
such as John Stuart Mill or Mathew Arnold. The focus on
class led them to assume that ethnic and religious ha-
treds had largely been superseded or on the down-turn in
European industrialised societies an error shown upspec-
tacularly during the Nazi pogroms of the 20th century.
The History of British India-, written by John Stuart
Mill's father James Mill, and deemed the first comprehen-
sive history of India, articulates very explicitly this
dichotomous view of Indian and European societies. Mill
projects Indian history since the arrival of Islam as a
millennial struggle between two monolithic civilisations,
Hinduism and Islam, providing fodder for subsequent
sub-continental fundamentalisms. A corollary of the
view, of inherent divisiveness running through the Indian
polity, is the need for a strong and despotic government,
a Hobbesian machine that can bring order to squabbling
communities.
Given the semantic horizon within which it originated,
current uses of the word 'communal' carry little sense.
Its usage is itself parochial. It should be dropped with
'ethnic' or 'religious' substituted for it. The confine-
ment of its range of reference to the subcontinent im-
plies that differences in India are more pervasive and
intractable than differences elsewhere, so much so that
authentic nationhood is impossible.
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