or large landlord. Their two spacious rooms were crammed with possessions. Old blankets hung from rafters; agefaded sarees and dhotis and children's clothing were draped over lines crisscrossing the moldy walls. Life filled the rooms. Women stood about the perimeter, briefly smiling at us, then drifting away to rejoin the endless flow of domestic activities we could glimpse within. Everywhere children peered from behind doorways, edging out into the adult spaces with growing boldness as my visit lost its novelty. A naked boy about ten, clearly retarded, lay on the floor playing with motes of dust in a shaft of sunlight and singing quietly to himself. People glanced benignly at him from time to time but paid him no real attention.
Over tea and biscuits, I told Basantibala that I had come back to her village to study conflicts. I didn't happen to mention to her that I was especially interested in conflicts between Hindus and Muslims or that my study was designed to include places with no history of communal conflict as well as those known for overt fighting. Her village, Panipur, and Faridpur, the district in which it is located, fell into the “no conflict” category. So far, everyone I'd spoken to had confirmed that view:
[A Hindu woman:] No, we never had any communal disturbances.…Communal harmony was very much prevalent throughout the Faridpur area, even when there was trouble in Dhaka, Khulna, and many other places in Bengal.…Our Muslim neighbors, especially those who were highly respected people, used to assure us that they would not allow any such trouble here. They said that the Hindus should not be afraid of their Muslim neighbors.
[A Hindu man:] We [Hindus and Muslims] were good friends. We played together. We read in the same schools together. We were on the same football teams.
[A Muslim man:] Nothing happened here in 1946 [when there were massive riots in Calcutta and elsewhere]. In [1950, when major riots occurred in Barisal, near here] there were some little incidents…. It was not a plan. There were just some people, a few people.…We Hindus and Muslims were together.
[A Muslim man:] In childhood, I had many friends, both Hindu and Muslim. We made no distinction. We freely visited each other's houses, took food with no problem.
Were there ever any communal riots around here?
No.…The Namasudras [low-caste Hindu farmers] and the Muslims were both cultivators, they worked side by side, so there was no animosity between them.
When I asked Basantibala whether there had ever been fighting in her village, therefore, I was making conversation rather than expecting news. To my surprise, she answered:
Oh yes, there was, so many times. There were riots. Then all the Hindu people left.
I was flustered. “Oh, really? When?” I stuttered.
Spilling the Beans
The room full of people suddenly became quiet, and then it erupted into chaotic debate. Several men first denied that anything had happened, but when Basantibala persisted, everyone began trying to place “oh-that-riot” in time, a creative process involving big storms, dates in the Bengali calendar nobody quite knew how to translate into English equivalents, disagreements over who got married when, and so on. Basantibala insisted that the biggest riot had happened in the British period, when she was newly married and had no children. She guessed her own age to be about seventy, so that would have placed the incident in the mid-1930s, a time, I knew, of considerable upheaval in other rural parts of East Bengal. I was surprised, but the news was believable.
By this time neighbors had begun to drift in. With helpful enthusiasm they muddied the waters even further. Mr. Ghosh, an unassuming, immediately likable man in his sixties who lived next door, reeled off a whole list of riots:
Which riot are you asking about? At the time of Pakistan, do you mean? Do you mean the one at the temple with the Buddha priest? Or do you mean at Partition [in 1947]?
My head was spinning with this proliferation of mayhem. It didn't help that everyone was talking at once, adding to the list, placing events in other towns at different times, and generally being most unhelpfully helpful. At last a young man quietly brought some order to the proceedings with authoritative hearsay:
I heard from my father that there was this trouble.
What did you hear? There was some kheshari dal [a variety of lentil] planted in a field, and someone's cows ate it. The fighting went on for two or three days.…
Hindus supported each other, and Muslims supported each other. Then the police came and made a temporary camp over there to stop it. It was at the time of British Empire, not after Independence. Both Hindus and Muslims participated.
Here we had a nicely objective statement. It was nobody's fault: some cows ate some plants; the cows happened to belong to a member of one community, the plants to another; people fought, as people do over banal village disputes; the police came and stopped it. The young man had given us a skeleton of a tale. It was an incident that had happened many times in many places in India. But there were some tantalizing hints of bigger drama: the fighting went on for two or three days; the police not only came, they camped out.
Mr. Ghosh now took up the tale and began to hang flesh on the skeleton. Still contesting the dates, he nonetheless now understood that I was truly interested in this particular riot, and he set about covering the bare bones with tough sinews of intent and responsibility:
It was a very recent riot….
Side by side were a Hindu piece of land and a Muslim piece of land. In both fields, dal [lentil crop] was growing. The Muslim farmer kept his cow so that it could eat a little bit from the Hindu field too. A few hours later, the Hindu farmer came and saw that some of his plants had been eaten by the Muslim cow.
So the Hindu man went to the Muslim's house and said, “Your cow has eaten my dal. So I'm going to call a matabbar [village headman] and see what he has to say about it.”
The Muslim was not happy about that, so he put his cow where it could eat more plants. When the Hindu came to his field and saw more plants had been eaten, he became angry. So he took the Muslim cow, and the owner saw his cow was taken and he got a lathi [stick] and he ran after him and beat him. In the Hindu's hand there was no weapon [he was unarmed]. So the Muslim beat him, then left his cow and rushed to his house.
After that, Hindu people took up koch [a fishing spear] and lathi and swords and rushed to that field. And Muslims, too, came armed with the same things to the field. They fought each other for a few hours.
Then night came, and they went home. It became too dark for them to see who they were fighting, at whom they were throwing the stick. Also local leaders came and stopped the fight.
The Caste Hindus
It was clear where Mr. Ghosh's loyalties lay: it was the Muslim's fault. The Muslim meant his cow (a “Muslim” cow) to eat the Hindu's crop. The Hindu was innocent. All he did was to make a just complaint. Very reasonably, he proposed that the village authority adjudicate the dispute. The Muslim retaliated with more of the same injustice. Only then did the Hindu take matters into his own hands, seizing the cow. But then the Muslim escalated the fight to violence, attacking the unarmed Hindu. Outrageously provoked, the Hindus, now multiplied, took up weapons and fought, until night and local leadership intervened.
Mr. Ghosh was a Hindu. It made sense that he would line up with the Hindu protagonist. Mr. Ghosh himself was not a central actor in the Panipur riot, a fact established by his description of the morning after:
The
