Acknowledgements
The ideas that unsettled me during my doctoral years left me with little peace even when the thesis was submitted. Engendering of nationhood through performance formed the mainstay of my doctoral research in the context of the Swadeshi age. Dealing with the intricacies of performative mechanisms, I dwelled in the emotional plane of the Bengalis: ideas emerged out of their intellectual praxis into the passion of the people, eventually assuming the form of people’s emotions. Moving from the papers (newspapers, books, journals, and pamphlets) people read to the performances they enjoyed, ideas travelled far into the emotional world, where they assumed different forms. Nuanced they were, indeed, as I concluded in my doctoral thesis, but the shades they assumed remained beyond the framework of my research. However, the ‘self/selves’ of the dominated/colonized mind were a cause of constant consternation for my ‘self’. If the colonized did experience a mere discoursed and engendered nationhood, why did the emotional chronology of the period not attest to it? Why did the literature of the period, the memoires, repeatedly speak of a narrow line of separation, segregation? Above all, what in essence were the contours of the hidden transcript of resistance? As I engaged with these questions, a deeper understanding of the emotional world of Swadeshi nationhood emerged, and the resultant product is this book.
The research work that stands in the form of a book today could not have become a reality without the help and constant encouragement of several people who stood by me through thick and thin. This is my humble attempt to acknowledge the trust they showed in me, especially when I lost faith in myself.
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude towards my supervisor, Dr Shukla Sanyal. She saw me when I was an invisible non-entity in the masters’ batch of 2005–7 at the University of Calcutta,
Acknowledgements
India. Even after I started working on this topic, there were moments when I faltered, fell, and felt compelled to escape it. However, she stood by me resolutely and, never imposing herself on me, showed me the right path to take. When the arduous hours of checking and rewriting the manuscript began to take a toll on my morale, she made me see sense and put me under a disciplined order to bring out the best in me. I remain ever so grateful to her for those long hours of discussions and critical engagement that helped the framework of this book—my doctoral thesis—to assume a concrete form and shape.
I would also like to thank Professor Arun Bandopadhyay; Nurul Hasan, professor of Modern India, for his advice and support; my teachers at the Department of History, University of Calcutta; Professor Suranjan Das, vice chancellor of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India; Professor Bhaskar Chakraborty; Professor Suparna Gooptu; Professor Nirban Basu; Professor Amit De; and Professor Ritwika Basu, who have been, and still are, a constant source of support for me in my research endeavours.
I would like to extend a special thanks to Professor Hari S. Vasudevan and Professor Biswamoy Pati for the interest they showed in my work. Extensive hours of discussions with them helped me put my work in perspective. My gratitude is also due to Professor S. Maswood for her valuable suggestions and the effort she put into making me a better academician. I am also grateful to Professor Rajshekhar Basu whose constant encouragement and help enabled me to tide over the rigorous process of writing this book. To my teachers who endured me all through my formative period, Professor Subhash Ranjan Chakraborty, Professor Jayasree Mukherjee, and Professor Rajat Kanta Ray, thank you for encouraging me to be myself. I also remain humbly grateful to the late Professor Tripti Chaudhuri for her invaluable suggestions that gave my book and me a new direction.
While working on this book, I had to consult various primary records at the West Bengal State Archives (both in the Home Political Section as well as the Intelligence Branch Records) and the help I received there from Sucharita-di, Jhuma-di, Professor Subhash Ranjan Chakraborty, and the late Professor Basudeb Chattopadhyay deserves special mention because without their assistance, I could not have completed this book.
I am much indebted to the staff at the National Library of India, Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, Kolkata Police Museum Library, Ariadaha
Public Library, and Central Library, University of Calcutta (Alipore Campus), all in Kolkata, and the National Archives and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, in New Delhi, who extended help to me graciously and tirelessly for this book. All my hard work would have been in vain had I not found the platform to work and for that I owe a lot to Samir-da in the Department of History Library, University of Calcutta, Anisur-da of the department office, and Bijoy Dey of Presidency College Library, Kolkata.
The limits of my critical faculties were put to the test whenever the ideas that came alive in this book were presented before my peers, The exercise always resulted in helpful observations and comments that enhanced the analytical potential of the book. For this, I remain ever grateful to the journals that published my papers and graciously extended their permission and support when these papers became a part of the present book. I hereby take the opportunity to extend my gratitude towards The Journal of Historical Review, Exploring History, The Inclusive (an online journal), Social Scientist, Indian Historical Review, and Societal Studies
I have been considerably fortunate in finding support in my colleagues, family, and friends who have borne my complaints and bad temper with the sweetest disposition. This book would perhaps have remained an unrealized dream had my friends not constantly coaxed me into action. Therefore, I take this opportunity to thank my colleagues at Victoria Institution College, Kolkata, St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College, Kolkata (especially Mousumi-di, Santanu-da, Sutapa-di, and Anamitra-di), and Mankar College, West Bengal. My friends have constantly supported me through my bad as well as good times, but above all, I would like to thank Monideepa, Priyanka, and Ausmita for standing by me. A special thanks goes to Manas and Nandini who have not only been my friends, but also my support during trying times. I would also like to thank Babli, Piku, Chumki, Babai, Bukan, Arghya, Munna-di, Partha-da, Arghyadeep, Avirup, Gurguri, and July for being with me when I needed them the most.
Most importantly, I would like to extend my gratitude to my sisters, Sudataa and Sabik, for being my guiding stars, my mother for being so patient with my erratic work hours and tremendous bad temper, my brother-in-law Rahul for always being there for me, and my nephew Gogol for being the most pleasurable diversion whenever I felt suffocated
Acknowledgements by the pressure of work. Last, but definitely not the least, I would like to dedicate this book to the loving memory of my father, who always gave me (and still does) the strength to re-invent myself at every turn of my life. Thank you all for being the bricks I needed to build this dream with.
In Search of An Emotional History of Swadeshi Bengal
The present study is a critical analysis of the process of development of an emotional bond among the people of Bengal during the Swadeshi era and the role performative spaces played in this regard. A major centre of popular entertainment, performative spaces also emerged as an arena for contesting the colonial authorities during the swadeshi and boycott agitation.
In this study, I have paid close attention to the three most popular performative media of Bengal—theatre, jatra, and songs. I have tried to map the patterns of modification introduced in performative techniques by Swadeshi performances. This has enabled me to unveil the intricacies of the interaction between sentiments, emotions, and ideas and contemporary political discourse, and the eventual development of a Swadeshi nationhood. For a detailed examination of the emotional nature of nationhood that developed in Bengal, I have restricted the timespan of the book from 1905 to 1912. The unfolding of the swadeshi and boycott agitation, however, was not the only reason for choosing this period as the chronological framework of the book. The vibrant and experimental nature of popular Bengali performances of the time and the treatment of theatre as an active political space by colonial authorities also drew my attention to this period. The association and intermingling of prevalent political ideas with performance was remarkable, and greater so was the emotional expression that it engendered (often referred to as seditious by various documents of the British Raj). The emotion and bond that emerged from it set a paradigm for the twentieth-century nationalist movement and for the generation that followed.
PerformingNationhood:TheEmotionalRootsofSwadeshiNationhoodinBengal, 1905–12. Mimasha Pandit, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199480180.001.0001
‘The play-as-text can be performed in a space, but the play-as-event belongs to the space, and makes the space perform as much it makes actors perform.’1 Space of performance, in traditional performance terminology, was believed to be a mere arena of enactment. When analysed in the light of performance studies, however, the space includes not the area alone, but the actors and the spectators as well. In this capacity, it serves as a point of communication between the narrative of the performance, the performers, and the audience. As a result, space can combine different time frames, that in which the performance takes place (in this case, the Swadeshi age) and that of the performance (for instance, morning or evening) with the time performed onstage (that is, the historical or social time presented in performance). Such a process of framing evoked a connection between the real and the fictional space.2
The process of dissemination and understanding of ideas acquired volatility due to this inherent quality of the performative space. Caught within the web of enactment, the performer and the spectator weaved new meanings and interpretations into their shared experience of the performance.
Swadeshi jatra, theatre, and songs reworked the traditional performative space into a performative element, transforming the space of folk entertainment into an area of meeting, seeing, understanding, discussing, and finally, responding. Watching a performance together and simultaneously responding to it allowed the spectators to realize the similarity in their responses. By virtue of this connection, people gained the power to pass judgements. The voice of the people began to be taken into account due to the changes it could demand to be introduced in the performance. The performer and other performative faculties, on the other hand, could modulate the opinion of the people, that is, the way they responded to the ideas exhibited in the space. In most cases, both the performer and the spectator engaged in a tussle to influence the other’s opinion/expression. In this manner, the performance established a cyclic relationship between the performer and the audience.
1 David Wiles, ‘Introduction’, A Short History of Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
2 Gay McAuley, ‘Introduction’, Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1999.
Performative space included the spaces of gathering where the performance took place. In traditional performance terminology, space of performance is defined as an area where both the performer and the spectator come together. Having the ability to connect the two, space frames the performance.3 Encompassing the performance with its ensemble of performers and spectators, space sets the parameters of representation and drawing meanings from it.
In order to make it easier to understand the unique, though critical, contribution of performative space to the history of engendering of an emotional bond among Bengalis, I would like to clarify the usage of the terms ‘popular entertainment’ and ‘folk entertainment’ in the book. I have used the terms interchangeably, referring to forms of entertainment enjoyed by people. A distinction can hardly be drawn on the ground of recognizability, as it seems that such features are not confined to any one form of entertainment. Sumanta Banerjee is of the opinion that folk entertainment and popular entertainment had features in common, and that a performance by performers familiar with the spectators at a social level was equally valid for both forms of entertainment.4 Though popular performances retained ‘collective autonomy’, the means of performance served as a common feature exhibited by both these forms of entertainment. The autonomy, in context of the Swadeshi intellectual world of the early twentieth century, engendered homogeneousness among the audience.
The term ‘performative tools’ best describes the collective autonomy of the performances, highlighting the various features of popular performances. Performative tools encompass little details like costumes, props (including scenery, posters, banners, or even pamphlets), and even the space of performance, that is, the mise-en-scène that enhances the meaning-making ability of a performance and engenders a bond between the spectators.
3 McAuley, in his analysis of the significance of space in theatrical performance, grants the area of performance the role and status of a catalyst. Space played a powerful role in forging a close relationship among wholly unconnected groups of people and two different time frames. For an in-depth discussion, see McAuley, Space in Performance.
4 Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989, p. 2.
Performative tools introduced a change in the way people/the audience visualized the space of performance, as well as their sociopolitical sensibility. However, the introduction of change needs to be gauged in the context of two developments that occurred during the period—presence of a fully grown public sphere, and the outbreak of the Swadeshi and boycott agitation against the decision of the colonial authorities to partition Bengal. Ever since the development of a public sphere, the politics of Bengal worked within its domain. Constant reference to the colonial administration and remission of the situation (social, political, economic as well as cultural) created by its presence formed the mainstay of the political expression of the colonized. The presence of a public sphere, however, required the political ideas to earn the approval of people. Communicative media, especially performance media, became a popular means of disseminating these political ideas and for allowing the people to pass their judgment on them.
Dramatic representations of the nineteenth century, with cynical portrayals of the evils of modern society, tried to launch an attack on colonial rule as the perpetrator of all evil. Farces dealing with the low ebb of social morality and economic problems proliferated and were performed on the stages of Bengal and tried to generate popular support against colonial modernity.5 Scandalous affairs (such as the Mahanta–Elokeshi
5 A new genre of patriotic plays made their appearance during the 1870s that contextualized the lives of fictitious characters in a historical setting, ones holding a reference to the colonial rule of the British in Bengal. By patriotic plays, I mean to highlight plays based on the life and amours of some fictitious characters. In these plays, the tyranny of the colonial rule provided the background for generation of a crisis in the lives of the characters, resolved through restoration of the pristine order. Upendranath Das, Sarat Sarojini, Surendra Binodini, Calcutta: J. P. Ray and Co., 1880; Jyotirindranath Tagore, Sarojini, Purubikram, Kiranchandra Bandopadhyay’s Bharat Mata [Mother India], Bharat Jaban [Indian Infidels], and Haran Chandra Ghosh’s Bharat Dukkhini [Ill-fated India] belonged to this genre of plays performed during this period. For a detailed discussion of the historical plays of the 1870s, see H. N. Dasgupta, The Indian Stage, Metropolitan Printing and Publishing House Ltd., 1934, pp. 270–86; Sisir Kar, British Sashone Bajeyapto Bangla Boi [Bengali Books Proscribed under the British Rule], Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1988, pp. 130–4. Also see, Pabitra Sarkar, ‘Unobingsho Shatabdir Bangla Natok O Tar Proyogkala’ [Bengali Drama and its Application in the Nineteenth Century],
affair)6 became a staple of this genre of performances that tried to unveil the disruption caused by colonial rule in the idyllic social fabric of India. Until the advent of the Swadeshi and boycott agitation, such a portrayal had remained subtle in nature, never directly engaging with the colonial authorities. The wrath of Bengalis against the partition of Bengal found a voice in the vituperations that poured out in the performative space. The language of accusation became more direct, owing to the intellectual milieu of the age. One begins to comprehend the Bengali world of ideas through an article published in the Bengali journal Natyamandir, where the author drew the attention of readers to two very important terms: Bangadesh and jatiyabhab. The term ‘Bangadesh’ brought together two different social–geographical ideas—Banga and desh7—that coalesced to give form and shape to a political/territorial boundary of Bengal. However, the process of imagining this boundary offered several obstacles that required one to overcome the abstract nature of the boundary. In order to give the boundary a form, the population residing within it needed to be marked out by the presence of a common bond among them, a jati. Treated as a multi-dimensional term, jati implies an association by birth, race, caste, sub-caste, tribe, and nation. Thus, the emotional bond among the members of a jati, or one’s kinsfolk, came to be referred to as jatiyabhab.
However, this presented a problem for the Santhals, the Biharis, and the Ahoms, who could not be incorporated into the linguistic and ethnic in Unish Shotoker Bangali Jibon O Sangoshkriti [Bengali Lifestyle and Culture of the Nineteenth Century], ed. Swapan Basu and Indrajit Choudhury, Calcutta: Pustok Biponi, pp. 511–29, 520–2.
6 Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wives, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion and Cultural Nationalism, New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2000, pp. 56–9.
7 The word Banga or Vanga, actually a Persian word, gained currency during the Muslim period. Historians maintain different opinions regarding the meaning of the word Vanga. Some believe it to be the name of an ancient Magadhan king, while others consider it to be a derivative of the word Vanga, which means a marshy land. The meaning of the word desh was multi-connotative during the age. It was used to signify a range of meaning from a subregion, to a region, to a country. For a detailed discussion on both the terms, see Swarupa Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal: Perspectives on Samaj, 1870–1905, Leiden: Brill, 2009, pp. 108–9, 277–8.
framework of jati. To overcome this problem, the intellectuals endeavoured to build a jati, jatir gathan (engendering nationhood), imbued with a samajik (social) meaning.8 Accommodating various families, jatis, castes, and regions within its domain, samajik linkages served as an all-encompassing concept. It forged a link between all who shared the same bloodline, matrimonial relations, private spaces (houses), social spaces (neighbourhoods), office spaces and so forth, that came to be referred to as atmiya svajan (kith and kin).9 The emotion people felt for their samajik linkages, a social network, was associated with the emotion they nurtured for a cultural notion of jati, thereby tr ansforming jati into a socio-cultural identity. The roots of self-identification were shifted from ethnicity to the samajik linkage of atmiya svajan to lay the foundation of self-knowledge.
Atul Chandra Basu praised natyashala or the theatrical houses of Bengal for engendering jatiya bhab among the people of Bangadesh.10 Following his argument, one can assume that if the Bengalis were imbued with the knowledge of ‘self’, performance had an important role to play in it. The knowledge of the ‘self’, in the context of colonial domination—which was felt most acutely in 1905 due to the partition of Bengal—assumed the form of what intellectuals described as swadhinatar bhab. The word ‘swadhinata’ stood for liberation from the control of the ‘other’ dominant power. What the intellectuals sought was not just liberation from colonial control, but liberation of the swadesh that loosely meant one’s country (sva: one’s own, and desh: region, country).
Dissemination of such ideas by means of performance conferred upon people the sense of ‘jatiya bhab’, a distinctive status that separated them from the ‘other’. Meaning, once the emotion of jati associated with the notion of swadesh, it created an ‘other’ that was opposed to the oneness invoked by the coalescence of the two. The presence of the ‘other’ served as an additional, and a very important, source of engendering indigeneity. However, the engendered emotion needed to be ingrained
8 Gupta, Notions of Nationhood in Bengal, p. 143.
9 For an in-depth discussion, see Ronald B. Inden and Ralph W. Nicholas, Kinship in Bengali Culture, New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2005, p. ix, Chapter 1.
10 Atulchandra Basu, ‘Banglar Rangalay’, Natyamandir, 1318 B.S. (1911), cited in Prabhatkumar Das, ‘Bangabhanga: Bangarangamancha O Jatrar Ashor’, Parikatha, 2005, pp. 281–319, p. 281.
not merely in the minds of the people, but in their hearts as well. This could not be achieved unless a passion was invoked. A solution to this dilemma appeared in an article of a seditious series, ‘Mukti Kon Pathe’, where the author suggested a simple means:
Jatra … dvara svadhinatar abashyakata prachar kora … rogike chini makhano bodi khawaibar moto eishakal amod-promoder bhitor diya swadhinatar bhab prachar sadharaner mon bodo sahajei taha graham kore.
[Jatra … preaches the necessity of independence … like giving a patient a sugar-coated pill, if the passion of independence is promoted amongst people through such a medium of entertainment, people would easily accept it.]11
Such measures ensured a union of the ideas of the intellectuals with the emotions of people.
The process of establishing this link, however, was not easy. Popular emotion, closely associated with their inherent emotions, could only be invoked by calling upon the root metaphors that triggered it. A set of culturally identifiable motifs typical to the socio-cultural sensibility of the people, the root metaphors held the key to popular emotion. The Swadeshi performances, in order to effect the desired coalescence, used more of such metaphors to trigger and direct the inherent emotions of people in favour of swadeshi and against the ‘other’. Therefore, vigorous attempts were made to create a public space where the Bengali audiences could be made to understand the ideas of the age, discover a concord between it and their beliefs, internalize the product that emerged from this concord, and transform it into a part of their mentality.
It was in this intellectual ambience that the colonial government introduced the plan to partition Bengal in 1905. Although a vigorous agitation unfolded, the partition of Bengal was carried out and the new provinces of Eastern Bengal and Assam were formed. Speech-making, political gatherings, monster-sized meetings, and display of violence (political dacoity and assassinations) began to work changes in the opinion of the people. Narratives in newspapers and other print media
11 Abinash Chandra Bhattacharyya, Mukti Kon Pathe [Which Way Lies the Freedom], Kolkata: Punascha, 2006, p. 145.
made such actions a much talked-about affair. This influenced the mentality of the people and affected the prevailing ties holding them together. The erstwhile bond, rooted in factors like caste, ethnicity, clanship, and regionality, was replaced by a broader category of communion. However, one would be sorely mistaken to assume that the old sentiments and emotions were totally rejected. On the contrary, the ancient sentiments were modulated to adapt to a broader framework of belonging—more suited to the politics of the time.
I adopted cultural criticism, anthropology, and performance studies to form the standard theoretical approach while working on the performance history of the Swadeshi era. Navigating through untraced terrains proved a difficult task and required me to work with a framework that would throw light on the obvious as well as the suppressed. I used cultural criticism as the broader framework to understand the process of identity formation in the context of political developments and social progress. Since the late twentieth century, cultural criticism has served its purpose well to decipher the patterns of cultural development at social, political, and emotional planes, and the link it shared with the broader mentality of the era. Ethics of analysis and ethics of interpretation12 have been applied to understand different historical landmarks such as the French revolution, various cultural developments like that of England, and the process of identity formation as in the case of Americanism. Cultural criticism combined with anthropology helped critically trace the development of unique identities in respective societies. This, however, assumed a more complicated aspect when applied in the framework of Swadeshi performance and simulacrum. Multiple definitions and interpretations can emerge from the exercise. To sift through the multilayered terrain, I adopted performance analysis as a necessary tool to understand the transition that diverse emotions underwent in order to develop a perceived homogenous passion. Homogenization of emotions occurred in the context of cultural mentality. Therefore, to appreciate the transition of public emotion
12 Greg Forter, and Paul Allen Miller, Desire of the Analysts: Psychoanalysis and the Cultural Criticism, New York: SUNY Press, 2008, p. 14.
from diverse to homogenous, one must first comprehend the mental framework in which it unfolded. Thus, a brief analogy of the cultural mentality that the Bengalis held and nourished in the beginning of the twentieth century,13 in such a case, becomes indispensable. Bengalis viewed culture as an aesthetic product that developed from a spiritual engagement of the colonized with the Western framework created by the colonizers. The critical faculty of culture that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century was, in a way, a distant echo of the contests and reconciliations that had occurred in the previous century. For such obvious reasons, despite differing on finer elements, the essence of understanding and critiquing culture remained the same among the larger section of Bengalis. In the eyes of early nationalists, the union between spiritual form and culture was inevitable, even desirable. Men such as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Nabagopal Mitra (the progenitor of Hindu Mela), and Madhusudan Dutta and Bhudeb Mukhopadhyay (dubbed as reformist and traditionalist respectively) believed that spiritual forms triggered cultural development. Everything material lacked aesthetic, hence was deemed unfit to be a part of culture as a whole. Folk and popular art forms bore the brunt of the crusade against vulgar elements that morally corrupted the taste and mentality of people. Nationalists carried out vigorous acts of purification using
13 The nineteenth century in Bengal was an era of intellectual efflorescence. Sushovan Sarkar (alias Amit Sen) and Kenneth W. Jones located in the efflorescence of new ideas about one’s past, language, literature the roots of a new Bengali culture that adopted the Classical past to the Western idea to develop a new Bengali identity. A root of this new identity was located in the Western ideology of culture. The reservation of ‘moral’ and ‘vulgar’, hence, figured prominently in the emergent Bengali culture and its sense of aesthetic. These elements became the basic standards for measuring the value of a performance. Unless the performance carried character building and moral elements, it was neither critically acclaimed nor considered viewable. Popular and acclaimed performances like Bilbamangal, based on moralizing spiritual and historical themes, had little or no connection with the folk or popular element characterized as vulgar and harmful to the character-building process of the society. For an in-depth discussion, see Susobhan Sarkar, On the Bengal Renaissance, Calcutta: Papyrus, 1979; Amit Sen, Notes on the Bengal Renaissance, Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1946; Kenneth W. Jones, New Cambridge History of India, vol. 3, Part 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
media such as newspapers, periodicals, and journals. It warned the Bengalis that unless discarded, vulgarity of popular art forms would disrupt the moral and social order of Bengal. Only such performances that supported the moral character-building elements of civilization held the promise of replenishing the moral value of a society, attracted the attention of critiques, and came to be defined as ‘culture’.
Parameters of culture underwent transformation when the colonizers, in their attempt to gather more knowledge about the colonized, theorized Indian culture. The beginning of this process can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when volumes of reports reached the local government from the local policing authorities. The reports were sampled, labeled, and stacked in a neat order of reference for the government translators. Their duty was to translate the collected material and detect traces of sedition in it. A list of aesthetic materials that held the status of culture, based on the précis and remarks that the translator wrote down in neatly marked columns, was recorded in a book. Such compilations often held a brief account of the performances noted in a column adjacent to the name of plays. The Criminal Investigation Department collected common Bengali songs in 1912 and compiled them together in a report to send to the home department of the British Indian government. Similar in structure to the official compilations of Swadeshi plays and jatras, the report had neat columns reserved for registering the opinion of the translator and the legal remembrancer. The analysis featuring in these columns formed the foundation of the colonial theoretical framework employed for investigating Indian culture. A puritanical approach was taken towards performative texts that appeared to be ‘bad books’ lacking ‘literary merit’.14 According to the colonial authorities, these pieces were poisonous trash concocted to gain popularity15 and not as innocent as they seemed on the surface.16
14 West Bengal State Archives (WBSA)-Eastern Bengal and Assam (Confidential), F.N. 410 of 1909, Notes and Translations of ‘Matripuja’ Songs, and so on, compiled by Special Branch, Eastern Bengal and Assam.
15 WBSA-Home Political Branch (HPB) (Confidential), F.N. 129 of 1911, Extract from the Report on Native Papers in Bengal for the week ending the 25 June 1910.
16 WBSA-HPB (Confidential), F.N. 129 of 1911, Confidential letter on 27/28 January 1911.
On the whole, the value-oriented theory of the Raj completely trashed Bengali culture and found it to be extremely seditious and with no visible (or inherent) merit at all.
Early twentieth century witnessed the dawn of a new era of overt political opposition as well as the development of a new cultural theory. The stunted social and material prospects of the Bengalis turned them against the colonial authorities, especially because of the cultural anathema of effeminacy that was imposed on the subject race by the colonizers. They held the imperial cultural theory responsible for their undersized social and moral prospects. Effeminacy became the bane of the Bengalis, used against their cultural individuality. Twentieth century nationalists tried to invert this image of effeminacy to alter the cultural identity imposed on their people.17 Folk and popular culture was overhauled to unearth stories of prowess and valour. Bringing the history of the local rajas, zamindars, and nawabs into the performative space reconfigured Bengalis as brave-hearted valorous individuals. Old practices and customs were infused with a fresh breath of life to celebrate the cultural uniqueness of Bengal. An article that appeared in Sandhya, a vernacular daily, in 1908 pleaded with its readers to adopt the customs and practices of olden days to establish swaraj. 18 Another vernacular daily, Yugantar, mouthpiece of the intelligentsia advocating radical ideas, vowed to preserve national arts and improve the social and cultural status of Indians—processes that it believed went hand-in-hand. Culture and cultural ethos emerged in their theoretical parenthesis as the soul of the nation, and were pruned and decorated to justify the masculinity of the Bengalis and the Indians as a whole.
17 Femininity was projected as an inherent quality of Indian culture on which their identity (rather their unchanging nature) was vested. As against the Indians, the English were projected as naturally masculine, hence fit to rule. Colonial forms of knowledge or discourses disseminated to justify British imperium, and the necessity to rule the weaker, upheld this stark division. See Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996; Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.
18 WBSA-HPB, Reports on Native Papers (henceforth RNP), Sandhya, 14 January 1908.
Early twentieth century treaded dangerous grounds in its theorization of culture. Rabindranath Tagore warned against the inherent danger when he stressed upon the necessity to wedge the gap between the educated and the masses.19 The attempts, though feeble and halfhearted initially, gained a new lease of life during the Swadeshi era. Popular media was clipped to fit the nationalist frame. The change made an impact on the process of theorization of culture. The ideologues of the era began to see culture as an aesthetic means of disseminating an idea of ‘self’. It is no surprise, a woman writing to the editor of a vernacular daily, Jasohar, laid down strict rules of culture wherein she beseeched her fellow readers to quit giving alms to roaming mendicants or bairagis (an integral part of the Bengali folk culture) who refused to sing Swadeshi songs.20 This particular form of theorization of culture held immense sway over the countryside, and soon after, bairagis and vaishnavis (female religious mendicants of the Vaishnava cult) were found singing swadeshi songs instead of religious songs. Culture, thus, emerged as a natural corollary of nationalism.
In the same vein, Satyendra Nath Dutta, a Bengali poet, celebrated the advent of Swadeshi nationalist ideas as the dawn of a ‘golden age’ in Bengal.21 Theorization of culture assumed a cultural–aesthetic mould where all literary texts and performances were considered to be the idiomatic representations of political ideas of the time. Culture, as a product of the glorious Bengali revolution,22 became the hallmark of future
19 Rabindranath Tagore in his novel Ghare Baire [The Home and the World] repeatedly highlighted the wedge existing between the intellectuals, their ideas, and the masses. The gap existing between the two and the implementation of the ideas often assumed the character of forcing the idea in practice over the masses. This remains a recurrent theme in the novel, exposing the wedge existing between idea and practice. See Rabindranath Tagore, Ghare Baire, Calcutta: Visvabharati Publication, 1916; Rabindranath Tagore, Swadeshi Samaj, Calcutta: Visvabharati, 1962.
20 WBSA-HPB, RNP, Jasohar, 16 September 1909.
21 Satyendra Dutta wrote ‘Banga-itihase aj elo swarna yuga!’ in his poem ‘Sandikshan’. The poem was published on 18 September 1905. The poem did not appear in print after 1905, until 1922, when it was republished along with another of his compilation Benu O Bina. Satyendranath Dutta, Benu o Bina, third edition, Allahabad: Indian Press Limited, 1906.
22 Binay Sarkar, a contemporary, has defined the swadeshi movement as ‘1905-er gourabmay bangabiplab’ [the glorious Bengali revolution of 1905],
nationalist historians who characterized culture as a consequence of political endeavour. Swadeshi movement in Bengal gained the glorified status of ‘the first movement of national independence’ in the writings of R. C. Majumdar.23 Haridas and Uma Mukherjee identified it as the inaugurator of a new age in Bengal that also wrought visible and significant changes in the intellectual plane of the Bengalis.24 Nationalist historians, by identifying a political event of the stature of the swadeshi movement as the base, relegated culture to the background as a mere product of it.
Culture lost all its singularity in the hands of nationalist theorists. The finer points of cultural efflorescence did not figure in the theoretical framework developed by them. They failed to grasp that culture was not subordinate to the political ideas of the time. The lacuna thus created in the critical evaluation of culture was filled in by the neo-Marxist historians who tried to evaluate society and culture from the perspective of haves and have-nots within the framework of hegemony. Historical works produced in this framework paid close attention to culture as an agent of political change and not its by-product. Sumit Sarkar’s seminal work25 on Swadeshi movement, published in the 1970s, illustrated the distinction between the ‘bhadralok landlorder’ and the ‘peasant commoner’ emerging from the stock cultural assumptions with which the agitators and extremists had entered the political arena.26 In the hands of a Marxist historian, culture assumed the form of tradition, deployed calculatedly as ‘a technique of mass contact’ to gain hegemony over the mind and body of the commoner.
Despite being evaluated in a different theoretical framework, culture failed to gain the status of an agent of change. Sarkar, though discussing the role of culture as a ‘technique’ to reach out to people, failed to explain the means by which the task of establishing a contact with the
cited in Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee, Swadeshi Andolan O Banglar Nabajug, Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 1961, p. 176.
23 Ramesh Chandra Majumdar, Preface to Mukherjee and Mukherjee, Swadeshi Andolan O Banglar Nabajug, pp. ix–xi.
24 Haridas Mukherjee and Uma Mukherjee, India’s Fight for Freedom, Calcutta, 1958.
25 Sumit Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1905–1908, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973.
26 Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, pp. 515–16.
people was carried out, and most importantly, how people reacted to it. Culture and its various intricacies, in this case, were left outside the framework of theorization. However, the all-encompassing approach of performance studies can restore culture to its rightful place as a means of communication, persuasion, and modulation.
Any theorization of culture requires shifting of attention from ‘culture as reflection’ to ‘culture as an agent of change’. To understand the ability of culture to inform political ideas, and not vice-versa, one must pay closer attention to the theoretical concept of culture. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, the deep impact industrialization left on the Western society and economy wrought a change in the idea of culture. As Raymond Williams surmises, it ceased to be the ‘culture of something’ and became ‘culture as such’.27 His theorization identified four layers in the definition of culture: first, ‘a general state or habit of mind, having close relations with the idea of human perfection’; second, ‘the general state of intellectual development in a society as a whole’; third, ‘the general body of arts’; and fourth, ‘a whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual’.28 The study of mentality to decipher the commonalties between the thoughts of one person with that of others of his time gained wider currency in the 1930s and 1940s. The theoretical framework identified mentality or ideas as the primary element of culture. Ideas or mentality became a matter of close investigation, necessary to decipher the root of cultural changes. The method received further primacy with the appearance of the works of Antonio Gramsci in which he stressed the importance of such cultural ideas or mentality in the formation of ‘hegemony’ or a power base.29 Henceforth, the study of culture, or cultural criticism, took the form of an investigation of the genesis of power. In the 1980s, Michel Foucault expanded the theoretical approach by asserting the importance of analysing the ‘archaeology of
27 Raymond Williams in his seminal study on the new role assumed by the term ‘culture’ in post-industrialized society traces the changes that its meaning and understanding underwent. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1960, p. xiv.
28 Williams, Culture and Society, p. xiv.
29 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebook, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2009.
knowledge’30 for deciphering changes pertaining to the root of power.31 Volumes of literature have been written by him to highlight the relationship between knowledge and power, where knowledge emerges from various discourses on culture, and power emerges as an outgrowth of the dissemination of that discourse. Developments in the field of cultural criticism since the last century have shown that one can better understand changes or developments in society, economy, and politics if one pays closer attention not merely to the ideas produced during the age but also to the agents of culture, that is, the elements that have the power to influence the way culture is understood and perceived.
These agents can be identified as the elements that were considered products of culture prior to the 1980s. The analysis of cultural products as culture-producing agents reached new heights in the hands of Victor Turner32 whose work on ritual process and social drama laid bare the performative nature inherent in almost every cultural development, and hence in social, economic, and political progression. In his works, cultural criticism became closely associated with anthropology, turning it into a study of not merely the formation of a culture, but also the experiences of that culture. The attention of historical analysis was thus turned to factors which had hitherto been kept outside its ambit, such as drama, rituals, and media. Drawing upon Turner’s thesis, I would like to argue that this space opened up by the Swadeshi performances had great potential. The space lay ‘betwixt’33 the two worlds where
30 Foucault uses the term to refer to the roots of knowledge, that is, the corpus of knowledge that presupposed the same way of looking at things, and the same division of the perceptual field. He said, notion or view of various things in the world are created by the discourses or narratives pertaining to it that he described as an organized series of descriptive statements. See Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, New York: Routledge, 2002.
31 Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, New York: Routledge, 2001; Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, London: Vintage Books, 1990; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, New York: Routledge, 2002.
32 Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
33 In the intervening liminal period, the state of the subject becomes ambiguous, that is, neither here nor there, and it lies between all fixed points of classification or categories of normal life. See Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors, pp. 53, 232.
‘anything [might] happen’.34 It was an ‘interim of “liminality”’ which held the potentiality to stand aside from one’s own social position and formulate ‘a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements’.35 Swadeshi performance as a ‘liminoid’ genre subverted the axioms and standards of the established social order.36 It provided individuals with a capacity to ‘stand aside from the models and paradigms for behavior and thinking which, as children, they are conditioned into accepting’. This helped them to ‘innovate new patterns themselves or assent to innovation’.37 The theorizers of culture of the Swadeshi era have missed this space controlled by, instead of controlling, the masses of Bengal, where both the performer and the spectator were active participants and not simply the objects of culture. The spontaneous development of varied and possible cultural practices in the liminal space, under the disseminative–persuasive and responsive network of the liminoid genre, was a combination of ideas given form by intellectuals and the perception of those ideas by the spectators. Above this stood the emotions felt by the spectators when visualizing the ideas in the liminal space. Emotions generated by sensation, spectacle, and music created a bond among the spectators. A community that bonded over shared emotions created an uneasy dynamic. Ideas and perceptions in this ‘betwixt’ space assumed a life and form of their own. The trajectory of this life and form, though ignored by intellectuals and nationalists over time, made its presence felt in the responses of the people. The present study examines the ‘betwixt’ mentality that became a defining element of the community-building sensation or emotion of Swadeshi Bengal.
Analysis of the performative media that created this fluid ‘betwixt’ space becomes imperative to better understand the emergence of a new bond in Swadeshi Bengal. For this, I am much indebted to the theoretical framework for studying public sphere developed by Jürgen Habermas.38
34 Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors, p. 13.
35 Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors, p. 14.
36 Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors, p. 14.
37 Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors, pp. 14–15.
38 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.
