[Urbanstudy] Locating Criminality (earlier piece ..sending again)

[sadan at sarai.net]

Dear sugata,
I immensely enjoyed reading your posting. There are few responses and 
related queries:
In descriptions on urban riots, there seems to be a way in which some 
localities appear as active sites, almost like a theater in different 
narratives of the event. While going through your posting, I was 
constantly revisiting my own impressions on localities ( and i do not 
know from where did I get this as I cant pin point any one literary or 
cinematic representation or official documents for this).
You yourself has pointed out how 'maidan' gets bracketed as the site of 
origin of 16 August Great Calcutta Killing. Similarly, streets also 
become a site for the play of violence, at times it is also the very 
site of the memory of violence.  A child, Ashis Nandy, watching the 
scene of violence from his balcony and remembering the city after half a 
decade can be taken as an example here.  These localities and streets 
then no more remain mere locations but also perform the task of 
networking routes occupied by violent 'crowds' and networking/linking 
up  traumatic memories. At this level, I think twin processes take 
place. While  particularities of graphic narratives of violence  in 
certain localities and streets acquire density the specificities of 
those localities start disappearing. And, at the end we are left with 
narratives of violence where names of location travel but only as a 
passive carriers/ locations of thick description of violence. In this 
context, do you think that the descriptions that you are getting from 
eye witness accounts from different parts of the city evoke different 
images of localities or do you see certain kind of flattening of 
narratives?
Secondly and related to the description of localities,  I am 
particularly struck with a brief mentioning of clash between muslim 
migrant day laborers and Hindu Up country milkmen in Manicktala early in 
the morning. It is slightly remarkable here that this thread does not 
get enough takers. In different  accounts of communal  clashes/ riots  
i.e.  Bhagalpur riots of 1992 as well as communal riots of colonial 
period (specifically in north India) we have images of milkmen as 
forming the core of the communal Hindu aggressors.  This is something 
which Laloo Yadav successfully  tried to change  ( few important credits 
that go  to him).  In the case of GCK of 1946, I would like to know some 
more on images of masculine migrant  Hindus, particularly images of 
migrant milkmen from upcountry. Can we fracture the discourse on GCK 
further by looking into images of migrants in this city. As you have 
written the clash in Mancktala was between two migrant  groups, I am 
curious to know your response on this issue.  This issue can then also 
open ways in which different kinds of gender constructs ( particularly 
images of particular kinds of masculine male bodies) acquire currency 
and circulate in the discourse.
There are many more queries but I think I should stop here.
Looking Forward to your responses,
Sadan.




Sugata Nandi wrote:

> Hi,
> I am Sugata Nandi, one of the holders of student stipend of Sarai for 
> the year 2006. I am woirking to finish my Phd dissertation to be 
> submitted to the Centre for Historical Studies, at the JNU, New Delhi.
>
> My topic of research for the Saarai project is titled "A CRIMINAL 
> RIOT: THE CALCUTTA RIOT OF AUGUST 1946 AND THE GOONDAS". In short the 
> project is an attempt to look into various mechanism the criminal 
> category of the Goondas were conceptualised, (re-) generated and 
> employed in the discourses on the communal conflagration of August 
> 1946 in Calcutta.
>
> Here is my first write up for the project. I will be greatly 
> benefitted if you all post your comments on the piece.
>
> I must also add the text of the write up is annonated but as the 
> attachment icon is not working at the moment I am being forced to post 
> it without footnotes. The inconvenience thus caused is deeply regretted.
>
> Sugata Nandi
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>
>
> Title: LOCATING THE ORIGINS OF A CRIMINAL RIOT:
>       Disorder, Criminality and Crowds in the Discourse on Great 
> Calcutta Killing
>
>
> By SUGATA NANDI
> E mail: meetnandi at hotmail.com
>
> (Body of the Piece: -)
>
> �This is not a riot, it needs a word found in medieval history, a 
> fury, yet �fury� sounds spontaneous � there must have been 
> deliberation and organization to set this fury on the way. The hoards 
> who ran about battering and killing with eight feet lathis may have 
> found them lying about or brought them out of their own pockets but 
> that is hard to believe. It is not mere supposition that men were 
> imported into Calcutta in making an impression.�
>
>    -- The Statesman, Calcutta, August 20, 1946.
>
> �� for two days � Calcutta was thrown open to the hooligans and 
> goondas of the city � during the 16th of August � looting, arson and 
> murder went on with all furies.�
>
>    -- Brigadier S.D.C. Sixsmith, British Indian Army,
> Commander of the Bengal and Assam area.
>
> �We felt that the Government of the day desired that goonda raj should 
> be established to allow the goondas to murder with deadly weapons 
> including fire weapons and to loot and commit arson�.
>
> -- D. N. Dutta, Member of the Bengal Legislative Assembly, Calling for 
> a No-Confidence Motion against the Muslim League Government on 
> September 19,1946.
>
>
> Introduction: The Criminal Riot
> ------------------------------------------
>
> The riot of Calcutta, August 16-20, 1946 stands as a watershed in the 
> history of communal politics in South Asia. The scale violence of the 
> riot, the number of people killed, the patterns of violence, the 
> consequences of the riot were unprecedented and are unmatched till 
> date in the history of Calcutta. In popular as well as scholarly 
> opinion the riot is named, the �Great Calcutta Killing� for the sheer 
> number of lives lost and the savagery with which thousands were 
> murdered within five days. To the eye-witnesses of the event and 
> historians who have taken it as a subject of study, the Great Calcutta 
> Killing (henceforth GCK) is documented as a pogrom. Historians, 
> journalists, memoir writers and diarists have taken pains to 
> demonstrate that the institutional politicians of Calcutta provided 
> the master plan for the pogrom and gave patronage to the members of 
> the underworld to actualize their plans. Criminality is, thus, seen as 
> not simply as one of the integral parts of the GCK but as the most 
> crucial constituting element of the riot.
>
> In urban history of Calcutta the riot has been taken as the signal for 
> a new chapter, especially so for its underworld. High rates of crimes 
> against person and property, unforeseen forms of offence, large 
> criminal networks or organized crime syndicates and their modus 
> operandi, the high rates of population transfer within the city and 
> the resulting ghettoization, the open illegal sale of fire arms, 
> protection rackets run by local musclemen and topping it all the near 
> paralyzation of the city police and the crisis of legitimate authority 
> of the Bengal Government � all put together constituted an unusual 
> period in the history of the city. For many who had observed the 
> changes after August 1946 it was the time of the �Goonda Raj� or a 
> proverbial period of anarchy brought in by rule of the underworld.
>
> The picturesque description of the time has been given by a Bengali 
> popular fiction writer, Saradindu Banerjee. In one of his short 
> stories set against the backdrop of post-August 1946 to 
> pre-August15,1947 Calcutta he laments about the daily existence in 
> Calcutta, stating: -
> �The initial volcanic eruption of the Direct Action has dies down; a 
> fiery undercurrent flows unceasingly, it comes out in sparks here and 
> there � in the borders of localities inhabited by the different 
> communities very often one hears the noise of trouble, shops are 
> closed down in a flash and soon the streets are strewn with two or 
> three bloody corpses. Suhrawardy�s (the then Bengal Chief Minister) 
> police comes and terrorizes the Hindus in the name of controlling the 
> situation, as a result the number of those dead increases by another 
> two or three persons. The corpses are then picked up police vans which 
> appear out of nowhere. Soon after such trouble apparent normalcy 
> returns to the city and life goes on as before.�
>
>
> A contemporary observer wrote in his memoirs: -
>
>
> �The great riot of 1946 turned the city into a fountainhead of 
> criminality. Each community armed its youth for violence against the 
> other community. Very soon it became a basic right of each citizen to 
> commit crimes. During that period even the most law abiding citizen 
> was forced to turn into a hardened criminal.�
>
> Scholarly historical opinion on the subject is strangely similar. 
> Suranjan Das in his study titled Communal Riots in Bengal 1905��47 
> says: -
> �The riot completely disorganized the city�s life� Calcutta witnessed 
> a big exodus I the aftermath of the riot � 10,000 had migrated by 22nd 
> August. Within the city itself there was considerable displacement of 
> population, with the Hindus leaving the predominantly Muslim areas and 
> vice versa. Fear of communal violence dominated �every phase of 
> Calcutta�s life� and both communities developed their own systems of 
> defence. Nearly 100,000 were rendered homeless. Retaliatory measures 
> adopted by both communities after the riot ��
>
>
> Discursive Origins of the Criminal Riot
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> The unanimity on the devastatingly criminal character of the GCK, 
> brings us to the question � what is the point of origin of disorder 
> and criminality that in turn rewrote riot history for South Asia?
>
> There is an uncanny unanimity on this question also among the various 
> kinds of discourse on the GCK. Criminality and disorder, in the 
> opinion of all the writers, originated from among the audience 
> gathered at the Maidan of Calcutta for the mammoth Direct Action Day 
> meeting held on August 16. The large crowd, more than 10,000 strong, 
> going by one estimate, formed the source of mobs that eventually 
> wreaked havoc in Calcutta by committing murders, rapes and arson.
> This mammoth crowd is said to have travelled in small groups to 
> different parts of the city, carrying with them message of Direct 
> Action from the public arena of the Maidan to the localities and the 
> interiors of the hearth and homes, where the same was translated in 
> the language of violent crime.
>
> At this point it is necessary to take stock of the strands of 
> discourse that have studied or remembered the riot. These can be 
> grouped under the heads: -
> 1. Government Discourse consisting of the official reports ranging 
> from the customary fortnightly reports to the proceedings of the 
> Calcutta Disturbances Commission of Enquiry, under the chairmanship of 
> the Justice Patrick Spens, which enquired into the GCK by recording 
> statements from several witnesses in 1946-�47.
> 2. Political discourse on the GCK produced through debates and 
> discussions on the floor of the Bengal Legislative Assembly as also 
> through pamphlets and newspapers functioning as the mouthpieces of 
> political parties, e.g. the Azad, the organ of the Muslim League.
> 3. Media discourse produced by the newspapers, other than the party 
> organs, published from the city. After the GCK the media discourse was 
> the most crucial source for recounting of the event.
> 4. Non-Official discourse comprised of the vast amount of diary 
> entries of eye-witnesses like eminent Gandhian and leading Indian 
> anthropologist N.K.Bose, autobiographies political activists like 
> Manikuntala Sen and Abul Hashim, memoirs of British Indian Army 
> officers like Francis Tuker to the same of the middle level Calcutta 
> police officers like Pancanan Ghosal.
> 5. Literary discourse produced by popular fiction writers of the times 
> like Saradindu Banerjee as also by later day journalist-novelists like 
> Gour Kishore Ghosh and Shankar Ghose, who have produced detailed 
> description of the GCK in their works.
>
> In all the different kinds of discourse listed above the discussion on 
> the riot of 1946 has started necessarily with the mammoth crowd 
> gathered at the Maidan or a park located in central Calcutta, which 
> had till then served mainly as a promenade for the Europeans or as the 
> site for military exercise or encampment. August 16, being the day for 
> Direct Action, the Bengal Provincial Muslim League had called for 
> mammoth meeting of Muslims on that ground.
>
> The most striking characteristic, in the eyes of a contemporary 
> observer, of the crowd was that �every one was armed�. Another such 
> observer claimed that the crowd gathered at the Maidan was comprised 
> of Goondas who slipped away in the middle of the meeting and started 
> rioting in thickly inhabited areas of north and central Calcutta. 
> Still others have located a few criminal with past record of offences 
> present in the Maidan the crowd as the unmistakable link between the 
> GCK and the crowd.  Evidence as  sketchy and flimsy as these have been 
> used in constructing the riotous and criminal character of the crowd.
>
> It needs to be pointed out that Government enquiry into the GCK proved 
> that long before the meeting took off at the Maidan, the first victims 
> of the riot had lost lives in a poor locality of north east Calcutta, 
> named Manicktala. There clashes took place between migrant Muslim day 
> labourers and Hindu up-country (meaning from present day states of 
> Bihar and Uttar Pradesh) milkmen early in the morning, with the first 
> casualty reported from the place as early as at 6:30 AM. This 
> instance, though documented with the weight of enquiry and cross 
> examination has not taken away the �riotous/ disorderly/ criminal� 
> epithet off the crowds gathered at the Maidan.
>
> This brings us to the first paradox of the riot discourses on the GCK, 
> which in simple terms is that the discourse on the riot equates the 
> crowd at the Maidan meeting with the riotous mob responsible for 
> actualizing the savagery and butchery while there is hardly any 
> evidence to back up such a claim.
>
>
> The Roots of the Paradox
> ------------------------------------
>
> The question that rises at this point is how does the criminal riot 
> discourse take off from the point where a large Muslim mass gathers in 
> the Maidan in spite of there being no evident link between the two?
>
> The answer to the question should be sought from the political context 
> of the riot. Communal riots that the South Asia witnessed onwards from 
> August 1946 had been rightly distinguished as Partition Riots. These 
> riots, though of varying intensity depending upon their geographical 
> and social settings, were characteristically genocidal. Communal 
> violence that British India had experienced prior to 1946 was in no 
> way similar to that of the Partition riots. Violence of these riots 
> was aimed basically at the exterminating an entire religious community 
> from within a well defined territory, which could be a locality within 
> a city, as observed in Delhi and Calcutta or even an entire village as 
> in the case of east Bengal, Bihar and the Punjab.
>
> The Direct Action Day was a call to arms sounded by Mohammed Ali 
> Jinnah, the Muslim League President to the Muslims of British India in 
> support of the demand for partition of the country and the creation of 
> a homeland for the Muslims. The actual programme of Direct Action, 
> though couched in the language of war like violence, was deliberately 
> left ambiguous. Studies on the riot have shown that the Muslim League 
> prepared large numbers of its supporters for the spectacular acts of 
> communal violence as part of secessionist policy of the League, but 
> mobilization for the event was carried out by preparing small groups 
> of men, focussed on a locality or an area within the locality, for 
> such acts.
>
> Running parallel to such preparations the League mobilized the Muslim 
> masses residing in and around Calcutta for the largest public meeting 
> in its history. The meeting was to serve as the platform for the 
> League�s political assertion of never-before proportions.
>
> That the League programme of mass mobilization was a success was 
> evident from the morning of August 16. League supporters took to the 
> streets in large numbers. The crowd has been claimed to have been 
> armed with lathis (clubs), daggers and soda water bottles.
>
> As the meeting got under way the restiveness of the crowd that 
> gathered there rendered even the League leaders addressing the 
> audience nervous. Abul Hashim, an eminent League leader who was one of 
> the speakers at the meeting, has emphatically noted in his 
> autobiography that the restiveness of the crowd increased with each 
> and every speech and fear of the crowd turning unruly loomed large in 
> the minds of the League leaders themselves.
>
> Belying the fears of the Muslim League leaders the mass at the Maidan 
> did not turn unruly and the meeting was finished as per schedule in 
> the afternoon. The crowd dispersed from the place right after the 
> meeting and before that news of rioting had started pouring in from 
> different parts of the city.
>
> In spite the very evident lack of link between the beginnings of the 
> riot and mass meeting of the Muslim League in heart of the city, the 
> crowd/s gathered at the meeting has been treated as the first evidence 
> of invasion of criminality in the riot of 1946.
>
> The mammoth gathering in the Maidan was essentially a political rally. 
> The size of the mass though indeterminate was not a novelty to 
> Calcutta of the 1940s; the city had witnessed mass demonstrations by 
> crowds much larger on occasions like the Rashid Ali day and the INA 
> day. The crowds on those days, however, have not attracted 
> descriptions similar to that of the Great Calcutta Killing.
>
> The reason behind the �criminalization� of the crowd/s at Maidan on 
> the first day of the riot should be sought in the wider context of 
> discourse on communal politics produced immediately before the riot.
>
> In the language of the propaganda literature and media discourse on 
> politics of Direct Action, August 16 was judged in the parameters of 
> the governmental responsibility towards a city as against the 
> political objective of a party. Legality-illegality/criminality became 
> a part of the discourse from the very beginning.
>
> While on the one hand the League was promoting the idea of Direct 
> Action to the Muslim youth and the city based Muslim lower classes as 
> a call to militate for their nationhood, on the other the Hindus 
> questioned the legality of their action by stating that the Muslim 
> League Government was carrying out preparations for the victimizing 
> the Hindu the population by means of arming the Muslims, specially of 
> the lower strata. The contention, in the main, was focussed on a 
> hartal or a general strike to be enforced by large number of League 
> supporters. In other words, the fear of the crowds had by then been 
> well instilled in the minds the educated and respectable sections of 
> the Calcutta society.
>
> The stereotype for the mass at the Maidan of August 1946 was produced 
> before the crowd actually gathered there. It was manufactured by a 
> thorough print media campaign. The binaries generated by a riot e.g. 
> the victim � aggressor and the criminal � legitimate, were already in 
> place before the riot occurred. The binaries dissolved the boundaries 
> separating secessionist politics from communal violence and criminality.
>
> Propaganda literature produced by the Muslim League generated and 
> reinforced the social image of a militant Muslim mass, it voiced 
> threats of extreme violence and sounded a call to the Muslim mass to 
> take to arms as a strategy for attaining Pakistan. Pamphlets issued 
> both in Urdu and Bengali by the League painted highly romanticized 
> wordy pictures of would be violent scenes of Direct Action. In one 
> such pamphlet one finds imagery of the thousands of Muslims armed with 
> swords killing Hindus to make rivers of blood flow through the streets 
> of the city. In another a Bengali poem warns the Hindus whose heads 
> were about to roll as armed bands of Muslims were approaching.
>
> Imageries such as these, though couched in flowery and romantic 
> language, were sufficiently powerful to send the message of the an 
> impending civil war like situation about to arise as the Muslim masses 
> responded to the League�s call for the Direct Action.
>
> Added to these the pronouncements of League leaders like Akram Khan 
> and the Mayor Calcutta, Mohammed Osman, which amounted to public 
> warnings issued by men holding public offices, had the effect of 
> creating a sense of panic among the Hindus days before the riot had 
> actually raged in the streets of Calcutta.
>
> The fact that the idea of a dangerous Muslim mass had struck roots in 
> becomes evident in the columns of newspapers, published from Calcutta, 
> which catered largely to a Hindu readership. A Bengali newspaper 
> published from Calcutta, Dainik Basumati, wrote on August 11: -
> �The League-wallahs should know that mere threats will not work. They 
> (Hindus) are known to face bullets and bayonets with a smile � they do 
> not accept defeat even for a moment � The League is free to test our 
> resolve but only at its own peril.�
>
>
> Three days later the main news story of the paper was
> titled �Large Scale Clash of the Hindus and Muslims Feared Ahead�.
>
> The Amrita Bazar Patrika, a newspaper known by then for its Hindu 
> communalist leanings, carried out a series of stories and editorials 
> stating that a general strike would be forced on the Hindus on August 
> 16 by large number of Muslim League supporters, who would freely 
> employ violence to attain their ends.
>
>
> Conclusion
> --------------
>
> Crowds in the riots have always been seen as a destructive force that 
> ushers in a temporary reign of disorder. A classic study on urban 
> crowds, George Rude�s book, �The Crowd in the French Revolution�, 
> shows that historical narrative of urban upheaval during the 
> revolution depended heavily on the construction the crowds. Rude has 
> shown that the entire phases of the revolution were explained by 
> nineteenth and early twentieth historians by use of the conceptual 
> category of the crowds. He is of the opinion, �� it (i.e. the crowd) 
> has been treated by one and all as a disembodied abstraction and 
> personification of good or evil�.
>
> The uniqueness of the different strands of discourse on the GCK is 
> that while following the usual pattern of employment of the category 
> of crowds either as good or as bad, the production of the stereotype 
> preceded the actual coming into being of the crowd. In other words in 
> this case the discourse brought in crowds in the public sphere much 
> before the actual gathering had taken place, and thus, the stereotypes 
> produced beforehand determined the perceptions on the crowd when it 
> really came into being. In this way the creative foresight of 
> political propagandist and the contemporary observer of the GCK has 
> informed the hindsight of historians of the riot.
>
> The image of a very large and the ferocious crowd had been created and 
> established in the public sphere mainly through print in the run up to 
> the riot. The crowd at the Maidan was made to fit squarely into the 
> fears and that in turn resulted in its being documented as the point 
> of origin of a criminal riot.
>
>
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