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Casteist demons and working-class prophets: subaltern Islam in Bengal, circa 1872–1928
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 October 2023
Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between caste and Islam in Bengal at a time when they acquired heightened significance as markers of identity for the colonial state and between communities. Scholarship, mainly drawing on North India, has emphasised the contrast between the existence in practice of a hierarchical system of social stratification among Muslims and the ideals and traditions of Islamic egalitarianism. This article, however, shows that caste-based struggles and tensions produced a revolutionary Islam. I suggest that the subversive potential of Islamic egalitarianism, described in early Islam by Louise Marlow, was kept alive by low-caste Bengali Muslims. The social reality of caste enabled multiple understandings of what it meant to be a Muslim, and the more radical among them were subaltern ontologies—different meanings of what it was to be a Muslim in the world. Here, I analyse writings on caste by four unreliable narrators around the turn of the twentieth century—a British colonial ethnographer, an ashrāfī Muslim anthropologist, and two Muslim reformers—to describe the politics and lifeworlds of low-caste Muslim groups in Bengal. The article argues for a more nuanced understanding of this period of Islamic reform and development, one that is conscious of the subaltern currents shaping its course. I show how a reformist politics of ‘rejection’ of elite Islam emerged as a response to the problem of caste inequality. These discourses and practices repudiating elite Muslim titles, centring histories of labour, and emphasising equality as an embodied experience reveal the revolutionary potentialities of a subaltern Islam.
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References
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90 J. Lee, ‘Disgust and Untouchability: towards an affective theory of caste’, South Asian History and Culture 12.2–3 (3 July 2021), pp. 310–327. This is a response also found in Tantric and Buddhist traditions.
91 Although I have not discussed it in this article, it would be useful to think of the secrecy practised by these sects in terms of Joel Lee's discussion of the Shi'a doctrine of Taqiyyah (concealment). For more information, see Lee, Deceptive Majority, pp. 252–290. The writings of Hugh Urban are also important in this regard, see footnote 93.
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96 Lanzillo, ‘Butchers between archives’.
97 Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia.
98 Dasgupta offers an excellent discussion on the role of anjumans in developing the politics of Islamic egalitarianism in Dasgupta, ‘Labors of Representation’, pp. 61–90.
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103 Ibid., pp. 77–120.
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106 Enayetullah, Ashrāf o Atrāf Samasya, p. 48. Author's translation.
107 Yaqub Ali is referring to Shah Muhammad Ismail's ‘Taqwiyat al-Iman ma Tazkhir al-Ikhwan’ published in 1825, and translated in Urdu in 1834. For more on the author and text, see Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth Century India; Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity.
108 Tareen, Defending Muhammad in Modernity, pp. 128–129.
109 K. H. Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought among North Indian Muslims (1917–1947), 1st edn (Karachi, 2015); N, Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. Cambridge Studies in Indian History and Society 8 (Cambridge, 2001); S. Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913–1929, 2nd edn (New Delhi, 2012); N. Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal, 1st edn (New Delhi, 2014).
110 S. Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta 1913–1929, 2nd edn (New Delhi, 2012).
111 N. Bose, Recasting the Region: Language, Culture, and Islam in Colonial Bengal, 1st edn (New Delhi, 2014); Amit Dey, The Image of the Prophet in Bengali Muslim Piety, 1850–1947 (Kolkata, 2014).
112 Gopal Guru, ‘Rejection of rejection: foregrounding self-respect.’, in Humiliation: Claims and Context, (ed.) Gopal Guru (New Delhi, 2009), pp. 209–225.
113 Ali, Jater Barāi, p. 5.
114 Lee, ‘Disgust and Untouchability.’
115 Enayetullah, Ashrāf o Atrāf Samasya, p. 10. Aimadars were individuals rewarded with land grants or remission from revenue during the Mughal period on the basis of them being Sayyid or members of the ʿulamā.
116 Ibid., p. 11. Author's translation.
117 Ali, Jater Barāi, p. 3.
118 Ibid., preface.
119 Ibid., p. 4; Enayetullah, Ashraf o Atraf Samasya, p. 14.
120 Stephens, J., Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 105–131.
121 Ali, Jater Barāi, pp. 5–6, 13.
122 Ibid., 6.
123 Lanzillo, ‘Butchers between archives’.
124 Enayetullah, Ashrāf o Atrāf Samasya, pp. 16–17. Author's translation.
125 Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, p. 290, 299.
126 Ali, Jater Barā’i, p. 16. Author's translation.
127 Similar sacred ontologies can be seen in Deepak Mehta's study of the weaver community in Bankabari, UP, and Richard Eaton's study of Sufi folk poetry ‘chakki-nama’ and ‘charkha-nama’; see Mehta, D., Work, Ritual, Biography: A Muslim Community in North India (Delhi, 1997)Google Scholar; Eaton, R. M., Sufis of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton; Guildford, 1978)Google Scholar.
128 Ware, The Walking Qur'an, p. 4.
129 Enayetullah, Ashrāf o Atrāf Samasya, p. 47.
130 Ibid., p. 42.
131 Bose, Recasting the Region; Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth Century India.
132 Ali, Jater Barā’i, p. 2.
133 Robinson, ‘Islam and Muslim society in South Asia.’