intellectual community. I felt too comfortable in my own; I wanted the challenges of disagreement and of fresh points of view.
At the same time, I was crusty and opinionated, and I felt some skepticism about what I'd find in that bastion of establishment, The Academy. In the event, I was surprised and gratified. During my first semester in the sociology department at Berkeley, I headed for a class on race in America, because I figured I'd meet people there who shared a certain set of social concerns. The strategy paid off handsomely, for Bob Blauner taught that course. I quickly came to value highly both his principles and his approaches to scholarship. Among many other contributions, Bob pioneered oral history as a method for academic research. Talking with “real” people is a touchstone, and time and again Bob has helped to bring me back from flights of rhetoric to the position of careful attention to what people say and do that (I hope) characterizes this study. His critical questions, always so respectful, helped me to focus my interests, and his encouragement of oddball ways of thinking and working has cheered me on throughout the years I've spent on this project.
At the same time that Bob helped me to find my methodological feet, Sandria Freitag became my link to South Asian scholarship. To find Sandy, a historian of India, when I crossed the bridge to Berkeley was a stroke of unbelievably good luck. She is a superb craftsperson of the historiographic art and a keen and creative thinker about questions of central interest to me. Not only did Sandy introduce me to the Subalternists, a group of South Asian historians doing some of the most exciting scholarship of the day, but she consistently encouraged me to go ever more deeply into questions about which I naively thought I understood something. Over and over, she posed a question that opened the lid to another whole level of inquiry, and she always did it with charm, goodwill, and a generosity of time and spirit that in itself was inspirational.
Kim Voss was the first sociologist before whom I laid my agenda for this study. In her own work, she combines sociological inquiry with historical method, and she brought her rigorous mind and enormous energy to the considerable task of making order out of my woolly agenda. At first I regarded her methods with suspicion, peppering her with abuse when she posed questions in terms taken from the physical sciences. But her kindness and patience eased me past that reaction, I'm glad to say, because what I met on the other side were hard questions of purpose and belief that had to be confronted and answered. With her unusual analytic capacity to take apart a question and construct means for answering it, Kim gently pushed me into a new precision which made my investigations enormously more meaningful.
Other faculty members at Berkeley also have won my gratitude. Jyoti Das Gupta, whose work on language conflict in India formed a conceptual backdrop to my study, gave me encouragement and assistance. Neil Smelser helped me think through some of my theoretical premises in a jolly process of friendly contention. Michael Burawoy saw me through a close reading of Gramsci that proved deeply satisfying in part because of Michael's erudite guidance and the thoughtful controversies he raised in our discussions.
In South Asia I was overwhelmed with kindness. First, I want to thank all the friends who housed me and fed me, who took messages and made travel arrangements and suffered through endless changes of itinerary. Chander Chopra in New Delhi is one of my dearest friends and a constant source of engagement both of the heart and of the mind. Govind Chopra, too, tolerated my endless comings and goings, always with good humor and generous hospitality. The Chakravartis in Calcutta are kin, a legal bond made actual over years of friendship. Smriti Misra in North Bengal is my sister and Mahamaya Roy my mother; without the interludes they afforded me for rest and restoration I could never have finished this, or many other, projects. Prodyot Misra spent long hours poring over tapes and translations with me, only the latest episodes in a years-long dialogue about history and ideas, a conversation that leaps over great expanses of time and distance to pick up exactly where it left off.
In Bangladesh, my newer friends, Ataur and Sultana Rahman, and their family and colleagues were indispensable to this project; many of their endless contributions are specified throughout the story that follows. In addition to what they did for me, their lives are an inspiration. In the work to which they have dedicated themselves and the diverse community they have constructed around them, they embody the spirit of respectful peace-making that this study is all about.
Not the least of what the Rahmans did for me was to introduce me to many, many people who helped more generously than I can say. Staff people at Gono Unnayan Prochesta-Reza, Provash, Kamrul, Anima, and on and on-mobilized numbers of people to meet with me. They cloaked my enterprise in their good reputations, giving me that invaluable quality, trustworthiness, which I had as yet done nothing to deserve. Then there was Mukta, who drove me up one side of Bangladesh and down the other, contributing along the way some of the most pithy commentaries I heard. Other friends also emerged from the wide circle of the Rahmans: Fuzlul Huq in Madaripur, Delwar in Gopalganj, the Hudas in Jamalpur and Rafique, Samir Ghosh in Kishorganj, Dr. and Mrs. Hossein in Mymensingh—the list is so long that I am bound to have omitted worthy names; I assure those people that I do so from disorganization, not disrespect.
Then there were the people who assisted me directly in the research. Dilruba Haider abandoned her own life with no advance notice, to travel with me throughout Bangladesh. She translated for hour upon hour, her attention never wandering; often when my brain had gone blank from exhaustion, Dilruba was ready with the next question, remembered the critical piece of information from an earlier interview, and was still capable of exercising the intelligent charm that made her such a pleasure to work with, both for me and for our interviewees. Meanwhile, back in Dhaka, another assistant, Rina, was spending hours in the archives searching out press reports and noting their absences.
In Calcutta, Bela Bandyopadhyaya suffered the extreme distresses of work in the West Bengal State Archives, sorting through mountains of materials tattered by the elements and eaten by “white ants.” On her own initiative, she found and interviewed migrants from Bangladesh in Calcutta, providing me with a fascinating dimension I would otherwise have entirely missed. Finally, she and her daughter Durba agonized over the transcription and translation of interviews, spending hours in the dark of Calcutta's power outages running machines on stacks of batteries and somehow finding a way to translate the spirit as well as the letter. Bela was more than “assistant” to me. A fine scholar in her own right, she fed me intellectually as well as literally, frequently pulling delicious meals, as if by magic, out of packets and parcels in the most unlikely places. In addition to all her other contributions, Bela introduced into my world of friends her wonderful husband, Nripen, whose ever-inquiring mind and enthusiastic encouragement delighted me and buoyed me through arduous moments in Calcutta.
Then there are the scholars who extended support of various kinds: Sumit Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, who sponsored me (I read Sumit's work on the Swadeshi movement early in the project with great appreciation, and I discovered Sekhar's study of Namasudras late in the project at a most opportune and fruitful moment); Barun De, who gave me encouragement and help in the formulation of the study; Surinjan Das, who made available to me his excellent, thorough study on communal riots in Bengal; Adrian Cooper in London, whose work on the Tebagha Movement opened new dimensions to my thinking; Salahuddin Ahmed in Dhaka, whose oral history project inspired me to believe in my own; John Broomfield, a noted scholar of Bengal whom I discovered just up the street from my home in San Francisco and who generously opened his personal library to me; and many others who helped to guide me through sources and possibilities.
Some key friends read the manuscript at various stages and gave me wonderful feedback. Matthew Hallinan, an activist with a mind that is never still and a capacity to connect from the heart that suggests the true meaning of spiritual, talked through some of the most central ideas with me and expanded my understandings. A. B. Siddique checked my accuracy and engaged me in debate about some of my political positions. Mariah Breeding read the manuscript with care and imagination, bringing to bear her keen analytic abilities and ringing clarity about how people work. Shelby Morgan reflected back to me the core of my ideas at a time when I was groping for focus.
Throughout the formulation
