in this case was tangible. So I eased Mr. Ghosh off the hook, turning to Altaf and asking for his version of the story.
I got the news at night that there was a little conflict between Hindus and Muslims, and that the Hindus were already out organizing a riot for the next day. The reason was that a cow ate the lentils in one field. A Muslim's cow ate the kheshari in a field of a Hindu. It was a very petty thing. For that, they had some chase and counter-chase in the late afternoon. A little fighting, too. Now the Hindus were out with their horses to inform the other Hindus to come next day, to riot.
Where before Muslims plotted in the bazar, now Hindus rode the countryside mobilizing warriors. If Mr. Ghosh spoke for caste Hindus, I thought, Altaf-uddin was about to give me the version of the Muslims.
Muslims in Bengal
Islam became a factor in the life of the subcontinent very early: Arab traders journeyed there within a few years of the death of Muhammad in 632. However, the Muslim community in India traces its roots to Moghul conquests much later, in the twelfth century. The first sultanate in India was established in Bengal, at Gaur in the district of Malda, in the early thirteenth century, and Moghul rule was consolidated elsewhere in the subcontinent only four hundred years later.8
The earliest Bengali Muslims were immigrants from central Asia, Afghanistan, Persia, Arabia, and northern India, 9 but only a tiny minority of the subcontinent's Muslim population today can trace their ancestry to immigration. Most are converts. Until the British government's first census of the area in 1872, Bengal was considered to be a Hindu domain. What that census revealed shocked both rulers and indigenous elites: Muslims constituted very close to half the population, and in some areas they were an imposing majority.10 Their distribution was uneven: some western districts, including those that had housed the earliest Muslim administrations, showed them in the minority. But in the east, around Dhaka, the capital of Moghul Bengal from 1612 on, Muslims constituted 60 percent of the population.11
Within that community there were vast distinctions. If the gulf separating high—from low-caste Hindus was enormous, that between upper- and lower-class Muslims was in some respects even greater. Class tended to coincide with origins. Upper-class Muslims traced their heritage to immigrants and claimed membership in a group called the ashraf. Converts, or the atrap, were drawn from the most oppressed among the population. While they were theoretically united by common worship and a theology lacking the sorts of rigid distinctions Hindus suffered through caste, ashraf and atrap Muslims were nonetheless severely alienated by culture and language. The ashraf prided themselves on their knowledge and use of Urdu, the language of the Moghul court at Delhi, which is spoken widely by Muslims in the northwestern parts of the subcontinent. To the ashraf in Bengal, Bengali was a crude and unworthy tongue. They especially disdained the dialects most common among the rural masses. Upper-class names, such as Syed and Shaikh, were similar to those current in Arabia and Persia. In fact, not all people with these names could claim direct descent from Arabian or Persian immigrants; high-caste Hindus who converted tended to be awarded these honorifics. People with Bengalified names, such as Mandal, Pramanik, Sarkar, were common among the peasantry and were held in contempt.12 So, too, were those Muslims who practiced despised occupations-weavers, shoemakers, barbers, and the like-all of whom, had they been Hindus, would have been Untouchables.
Between those who made clear claim to the distinction of ashraf and those who were atrap was a very small rural gentry. Although they occupied somewhat the same economic position as the Hindu bhadralok, and although they contributed some superb and beloved literary figures, they asserted far less cultural influence, for their numbers were minute. In the 1881 census, for example, only 0.92 percent of Bengali Muslim workers were listed as professionals, in contrast to 2.09 percent of Hindus. The commercial classes included only 2.55 percent of Muslims, 4.76 percent of Hindus. Fully 90 percent of Muslims were agricultural workers or laborers, compared to 76 percent of Hindus.13 But according to Rafiuddin Ahmed, a historian of Bengali Muslims, “numbers alone do not explain the insignificant role played by the middle income group and…their failure to act as a ‘link.’” The entire consciousness of these people yearned for acceptance by the ashraf Among Hindus, the bhadralok may have shared with their Islamic counterpart a hearty contempt for manual labor. But they could speak with other Hindus, however low-class, in Bengali, a language to which they were all loyal and that was embedded in a mutually understood cultural history. Many socially ambitious Bengali Muslims, however, revered a culture from another land, using a language wholly unknown to their lower-class neighbors. As Ahmed put it, “No effective leadership could be expected from a group striving hard to adopt a class culture totally alien to the common man.”14
Sitting in Basantibala's front room, however, Altaf-uddin seemed distinctly non-alien, a thoroughly Bengalicized version of Muslim gentry. Here he was, ensconced in powerful but friendly stature amid the beds and clothing of his Hindu neighbors. The scene before me could stand as a metaphor for Hindu-Muslim relations in the modern period: culturally both similar and different, socially both friendly and distant, historically both joined and antagonistic.
Culture and Community
When the British conquered India, the Muslim upper classes turned their backs pridefully on English education. Hindus, by contrast, and especially Bengalis, embraced it. Education was the entryway to middle-class life, and education in English, the language of the state, was most important. Before long, therefore, Muslims found themselves excluded from new arenas in which economic power was to be found within colonial power relations.15This principled refusal to accept positions as agents of foreign rule further increased the class divide within the Islamic community. By the close of the nineteenth century, Muslims in Bengal accounted for half of the population, but only for 29 percent of those in schools. Among college students the picture was even more polarized: 93.9 percent were Hindus, only 5.4 percent Muslims.16
At the same time that the Muslim middle class turned away from British education, they sought to distinguish themselves culturally from their Hindu neighbors. “What is it that makes you as a Muslim different from Hindus?” I asked a religious man. He replied, in English:
Religious performances are quite different. We go to the mosque, wearing caps, saying prayers there. They go to the puja [ritual celebration] in the Kalibari [temple of the goddess Kali], beating the drums, et cetera, et cetera.
There are people who are very conservative in both communities.…In general, either a Muslim or a Hindu, they strictly follow the rules, the instructions of the religion, [which makes] differences come up. A Hindu makes water standing, and a Muslim just, what should I say…The Hindu is not wearing [a] cap, the Muslim is wearing a cap. Just see it, that I am wearing a cap.
Nowadays there is some slackness in the customs. I cannot find a Muslim or a Hindu out by what they wear. Now they are all alike. They are not wearing beards now. They are not wearing caps.
This man moved quickly from a consideration of religious ritual to very personal habits such as urination. With great seriousness he bemoaned the inclination of youth to blur distinctions of attire. At the turn of the century, those very distinctions had been adopted with great deliberateness by his forefathers:
Ibn Maazuddin Ahmad…[in 1914] found his Muslim identity totally incompatible with local symbols, dress, and language. He…dismissed dhoti and chadar [a shawl] as explicitly Hindu. To him a Muslim attired in dhoti-chadar was as distasteful as the Sanskritized Bengali of the Hindus. Ironically enough, his own [writing] style was highly Sanskritic whenever he was not watching himself.17
Rafiuddin Ahmed writes that the change away from such “everyday Bengali wear” happened over a period of two decades. Seventy-five years later, it was still effective. Muslim men
