from whatever perspective, whether nationalist, colonialist, or popular, must contend with questions of community conflict. Too often such “disturbances” are dismissed as aberrations of human nature. But to do so is to relinquish any possible response beyond brute repression, and that response has again and again proven inadequate. More to the point, tensions between Hindus and Muslims have taken many forms in different places and at different moments, suggesting causes and dynamics that beckon to be understood in specific terms rather than universals.
If we avoid the temptation to lump together every instance of strife between communities inhabiting common borders—those sorts of conflicts called communal, nationalist, ethnic, and so on—then we can begin to ask a set of questions that are otherwise meaningless. What were the motivations of people who at one moment lived peacefully side by side, yet at another came to blows? What was happening to induce animosity, and what happened at the moment of conflict that decided them to mobilize and fight? What events, both in the large frame of their lives as occupants of a land experiencing historic changes and in the small frame of their day-to-day world, combined to inspire their acts of contentiousness? In particular, how did they comprehend and interpret those experiences, and translate them, both as individuals and as communities, into the dramas they enacted?
It is this space between the most private of experiences and the most public of actions that especially interests me in my study of community friction.1 When I consider stories of village communalism, I want to know how people saw their world, how they placed their own desires within it, and how their sense of political possibility was influenced by distant winds of change. It has become common to assert that the most intimate domestic behaviors are in fact socially constructed. Collective experience is translated into psychological reality through a web of ideas internalized as invisible assumptions about the world. To unravel the psychological realities of collective behavior, I believe we must look to shared areas of understanding and social location. For instance, group actions are formulated from the experience of identity, that is, the complex construction of an individual's location in the community and her ties with others. Similarly, the will to action is born of detailed ideologies that often are experienced as common sense or unexamined assumptions about rights and powers. Both identity and ideology-making draw deeply at the well of community memories, those shared histories constructed through storytelling that serve to define memberships within groups and relations among them, and that bound the formulation of protest.
Adventures in Methodology
To learn something of life on the level of internal experience (internal both to the individual and to the community), I determined to study cases of communalism through face-to-face encounters with participants. For my study I chose a northeastern area of the South Asian subcontinent called Bengal, specifically, the portion that is modern-day Bangladesh. (I'll say more later about how and why I happened to choose that precise spot.)
Hindu-Muslim “communal disturbances” (an expression that illustrates the inimitable British knack for understatement) first became noteworthy elsewhere in India during the nineteenth century, but they came later to Bengal, starting in 1907 and spreading throughout the century.2 All these incidents involved hostilities between peoples of the two communities, but there were actually very important differences among them. Some sprang from political disagreements, others from economic protest or neighborly disputes, still others from a host of creative causes. All drew in some fashion on people's identities as Muslims or Hindus, yet most were sparked by some clearly defined problem to which religion was not intrinsic.
The mystery that engaged me was why these struggles became defined as communal. Recent discussions have historicized the very definitions of communalism, calling attention to the role of British colonialists in conceptualizing and imposing a monolithic definition upon very complex happenings.3 Was that label indeed an imposition by outsiders? If the concept of communalism was a construct of the British policy of divide and rule, why, I wondered, did it work? Why did the people involved allow their troubles to be divisively defined in terms of Hindus and Muslims, considering the multiplicity of issues involved? Or did they? Were all these struggles about so many different things formulated by the fighters themselves as hostilities between the communities, and, if so, how did that come to be?
Having selected an area of study, I searched the archival record to catalog instances described as communal.4 From that list I selected six localities: three appeared frequently in the historical record as sites of contention (Kishoreganj, Gopalganj, and Jamalpur), and three were noteworthy for the absence of mention (Faridpur, Madaripur, and Sariatpur), because I thought it was as important to know why communities remained peaceful as why they came to blows.
I went next to visit those locations and began interviewing people, starting with the elderly, moving on to conversations with the young about the stories they had heard, asking people about relations between the communities in their towns and villages. Very soon it became apparent that I had made a mistake; I had assumed those localities not identified as contentious in official reports had been peaceful. While interviewing, I came by chance upon an event totally absent from any written record I had found: a riot in an out-of-the-way place. It had been blacked out of the press and recorded, if at all, only in governmental files currently inaccessible.5 I was thus offered the serendipitous opportunity to construct a history of an event solely from firsthand accounts. Although I went on to interview people in each of my selected sites, this riot became the focus of my study. The lack of a paper trail, which might have been a serious handicap, was in fact a blessing, for I was thoroughly constrained to do what my theory dictated: to build a history out of the subjective versions of those who participated in it.
Why was that a useful thing to do? After all, subjective accounts are just that: piecemeal approaches to a shared reality. Some thinkers argue that you cannot know “what really happened” by listening to the distorted memories of the players, many of whom in any case are now dead or dwelling in the hazy mists of old age. Instead, you must employ more objective reflections of events—documents or indices of material consequence.
It is true that the stories I heard in that Bangladeshi village were not about “what happened” (itself a questionable concept). What I heard was how people saw what happened, or, rather, how people remembered what they saw, or, rather, how they talked about what they remembered, or, rather, how they talked to me about what they remembered—or, rather, what I heard people say to me about what they remembered.
I was well aware that what I learned from my informants engaged my own history at every step of the process and was transformed in that interaction. “There is a relation between angles and attitudes. Where I look from is tied up with how I see.”6 Perhaps those angles are a problem. We could talk about them in terms of distortions and biases and blind spots. But we can equally embrace them as the point of the exercise. After a lifetime of engagement with other people's stories, with a strong sense of gratitude for the ways I have been shaped by those I supposedly influenced, I have come to suspect that all human understanding takes the form of conversation. I have a hard time believing in the myth of the lone thinker receiving enlightenment in grand isolation.
In this view, the “problems” of memory distortion, selective telling, and biased hearing become sources of understanding. What sticks in people's memories, what they choose to say and when they choose to remain silent, how they distort what they know to be their experience, and, overarching all, what I notice and what I overlook are all intensely informative. The selection of truths-to-tell constitutes a story within a story, or, more accurately, the context for the story itself.7 By looking at forms of discourse as well as content, we can learn much about individuals' relationships to institutions, about their experience of economic and political changes, about conflicts of tradition they are experiencing as social transformation takes place, for all these dynamics interweave in the manner of expression characterizing a story.
True, we cannot learn everything. Not every question is best answered
