COMMUNITY AND NATION: ESSAYS ON IDENTITY AND POLITICS IN EASTERN INDIA, By Papiya Ghosh,
Oxford, Rs 595

Space is an amorphous concept in post-colonial discourse. The latter half of Bill Ashcroft’s Post-Colonial Transformation is an in-depth study of space in post-colonial fiction. This space has physical, metaphoric and psychological connotations that are almost always intertwined and represented in socio-linguistic patterns. What we understand as post-colonial identity-formation is inextricably linked to the mapping of the psychological space of a community necessitated by certain historical exigencies. The gradual evolution of the communal identities of Hindus and Muslims in colonial India is an evidence of the creation of psychological space prompted by the instinct of self-preservation of these two communal entities.

This volume is a compilation of ten articles that the recently deceased historian, Papiya Ghosh, wrote over past 30 years. The articles empirically explore the changing contours of communal politics in India since the colonial era, as also the devious ways in which this politics challenged, manoeuvred and subverted the notion of nationalism itself. Ghosh chooses Bihar as the site of contestation in communal politics, highlighting the riots that not only caused mayhem and migration but also brought about radical changes in a community’s self-perception, leading up to its gradual stereotyping in the eyes of other communities.

In the first chapter itself, which focuses on the colonial Muslim politics in Bihar, Ghosh touches on problems of the Muslim identity formation. She insists that such an identity was, by no means, a given, nor was it seamlessly homogeneous as is commonly supposed. She points out that it had more a regional than a religious base to start with and that, later on, it fed on a political discourse to assume a more concrete configuration. In this context, Ghosh analyses the politics of organizations like Jamiat-Ulema-i-Hind and the Momin Conference, underlining their effort of appropriating canonical Islamic texts to construct a readily recognizable communal identity.

In the chapters that follow, Ghosh deals with the diversities and pluralities within Islam and Muslims in colonial Bihar. She unequivocally castigates the ideologies deployed by the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, the twin communo-political outfits that unabashedly catered to bigotry and paranoia, precipitating fatal consequences. She also demonstrates how the Congress, playing a moderate role, ended up being in a cleft stick, and sympathizes with that section of the Congress sardonically dubbed the ‘Congress Muslims’ by their radicalist non-Congress brethren. At the same time, Ghosh does not hesitate to flay some Congressmen for their complicity in the riots as well as for their public participation in Hindu rituals under the garb of nationalism.

Ghosh’s book shows how the agenda of nation-building was enmeshed with forces contributing to the consolidation of communal identities. It also looks at the issues related to expatriation, putative homes and trans-territorial nationality. But more than anything else, this book is about the dynamics of identity formation that defies the logic of monolithic formulation.