approach. If you want to know what social and economic conditions are associated with protest and rebellion, for instance, you might well compare examples from varied places and moments in history rather than listening to the stories of ordinary folk.8 But the questions that most interest me—why people live harmoniously together at one time and at another do not, or, more fundamentally, how people decide to form groups and act to change their world-can be well illuminated by asking the players. If the realm of inquiry is, as I've said, the intersection between individual and collective experience, then the perceptions of the individuals who compose that collectivity are very important.
The division between structural forces and psychological ones is, to me, a false one. How are we to comprehend a Bangladeshi farmer's understanding of his times if we do not hear his story in the context of a material, structural reality? No individual's psychology is divorced from the real conditions of her life, and those conditions are historical. Whereas a developmental Freudian view contends that individual psychology is formed in early childhood, I believe that people are responsive to change throughout life—not, to be sure, in some simple and linear way, but richly, complexly, informatively. Material conditions are inherent in every formulation of personal conflict, in ordinary people's grievances and quarrels and decisions to protest or to stay quiet. To lend a keen ear to the specifics of each incident of community conflict, then, leads us back to the general, but in another way and on another level. We cannot generalize reasons for each individual's actions, but by studying a given individual's personal story we can understand generalized relationships between individual and society, between personal decisions and public forces. Those abstract relationships are useful, not to explain why people have done what they did, but to raise a different set of questions. Rather than asking, for instance, what lapse of controls allowed aggression to emerge? we are led to ask, what goals did these people formulate at that historic moment, in response to what external events, and how did they come to mold their strategies in the form of community conflict?
To make such delineations requires considerable interpretation, and here again the position of the analyzer enters in. My own position was an odd one. When I began the study, I trusted that it would be informative, but I also expected that most of my information would be, at best, secondhand. What, after all, would induce people who had come to blows with each other to tell me about it? In earlier, more casual conversations with people of the region, I had often been told hearsay tales. But everyone always insisted that he took no part in combat; he personally would never do such a thing. I knew something similar would be likely to happen in my own world if I were interviewing people about incidents of racial tension, or anti-Semitism, or any of the other common forms of intergroup hostility. People feel frightened to confess contentious activities, or they are ashamed or ambivalent. People are intuitive and likely to pick up my biases against such means of working out differences, and they understandably protect themselves from censure, through the simple expedient of secrecy.9 It is a supreme act of trust and respect to talk openly about these things.
But my experience interviewing in Bengal was a very different matter. Sometimes I met the expected reticence. As often, though, people lavished on me their stories with openness and goodwill. Why they did so may have had less to do with me than with their need to tell their stories, to reflect upon and continuously reconstruct their own histories.
Honesty was also aided by the company I kept. In 1988, the year before my study, Bangladesh had endured terrible floods. Because I had lived across the border in Indian West Bengal for some years long before and as a consequence have a fair command of the Bengali language, I volunteered to help the relief effort if I could. To tell the truth, I thought it unlikely that anyone would accept my offer. As I was quick to confess, I could do little that was useful; I had few skills that would help repair damaged homes or heal damaged bodies.
To my surprise and eventual delight, I was wrong. A highly respected organization working in the rural hinterland of Bangladesh needed a literary person, ideally someone with a sociological perspective and experience in organizational consulting, to help them remedy a serious lack of documentation for their program. So overwhelmed had they been for two years in saving lives from floods that they had allowed their budgeting and planning and report-writing to fall far behind. Some of their funders were upset, and they were prepared to pay my fare to help their Bangladeshi colleagues clean their paper house. I went, worked harder than I ever had in my life, made friends, and was inspired and astonished by the capacities of these village-level workers, by their ingenuity and perseverance and optimism in the face of enormous odds.
When I returned, eighteen months later, to conduct my own research, which by then was refocused in Bangladesh, I found my friends there fully prepared to return the favor. Three of the sites I had selected to study fell within the work area of the organization; the other three were some distance away. The staff, however, was drawn from all over Bangladesh, so each of the sites either was the birthplace of a staff member or hosted an affiliated organization. All these people introduced me, helped to arrange interviews, spread the word that I was trustworthy. And so people talked with me. Over and over, someone would say, “You'll be careful how you use this, won't you? I'm only telling you because I've known and trusted So-and-so for years.”
This, then, is a study of discord facilitated by an act of cooperation. Never was an altruistic impulse more fully rewarded. What follows is a joint effort, one that has indebted me to all my hosts and facilitators, as well as to the women and men who shared their histories and their ideas so openly and so warmly with me.
To Western consciousness, the word India defines an area coincident with the British Empire in the region. In fact, that Empire has now become half a dozen more or less independent nations. My study is set in what today is Bangladesh. At the time of the events I describe it was Pakistan, a nation that had come into being only a few years before with the Independence of India. When writing of the area as a whole, I try to use the more precise designations South Asia or the subcontinent. I beg the reader's indulgence for my occasional lapses into the colloquial India to mean the region rather than the current nation-state.
The history of the creation of Bangladesh in the wash of colonialism and international politics is complex. A brief chronology is given in Appendix A, and I discuss the details as they are relevant to what follows.
All names in the account that follows, including that of the village, are pseudonyms, an attempt to preserve some measure of anonymity.
Part One
Making Trouble
Chapter One
The Quarrel
Cows, Crops, and Communities
“There was trouble with cows,” said the farmer. “I tied my cow and went home. But the cow got loose and ate the [plants] in their field.”
By the time the “trouble” was over, masses of men had mobilized, several people had died, many were injured, and life in the village was altered forever after.
The problem, it seems, was that the cow belonged to a Muslim and the crop to a Hindu.
I first heard about the incident from an old woman named Basantibala Majumdar. Her family were acquaintances of mine, and I had come to pay her a condolence call, for her husband, a well-loved and ancient man, had died since my last visit to Bangladesh.1 The monsoon season had made travel slow and wet. A village boat, rowed, poled, and pulled by a bare-chested, bearded man, had transported us through winding channels and flooded paddy fields to a muddy embankment not far from Basantibala's home.
The house was one of the few in the village built of brick and plaster. The Majumdars were Hindus,
