Hindu nationalist violence has a long ancestry, but its modalities have changed. If in the past the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its affiliates engineered ‘riots’ by spreading rumours and aggravating local tensions, they no longer need to do so. In the current political environment and amidst the massive growth of social media, the mere suspicion that a Muslim or Christian is violating Hindu social codes is justification for violence. While in the past, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) fostered Hindu–Muslim tensions prior to elections to influence their outcomes, it now does so more frequently and less predictably. Hindu nationalist violence has increasingly become both routinized and normalized.

As a result, the targets of hate violence have grown. Although they are generally religious minorities, they have come to include students, intellectuals, and human rights activists who challenge religious orthodoxy and government policy. They include Dalits who challenge upper caste domination, as they did in Bhima Koregaon, Maharashtra, in January 2018, when they celebrated the defeat of an upper caste Hindu ruler 200 years ago. They include women who sought to enter the Sabarimala temple in Kerala to assert their equality in matters of faith after the Supreme Court authorized them to do so in 2018. They include students from Jamia Millia Islamia, Aligarh Muslim University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).

Most existing scholarship on ethnic violence, including my own, has focused on politically motivated group violence, or what is commonly termed a ‘riot’. The concept of ‘riot’ implies a certain unspecified threshold of violence with respect to the number of people injured and killed, and the amount of property destroyed. However, the term ‘riot’ has always been flawed because it ignores the pattern since the 1990s of well-planned Hindu nationalist attacks on Muslims. It has become even less useful amidst the normalization of Hindutva violence since the BJP was elected to national power in 2014.

Documenting recent developments in India, I argue that we need to devise new ways of conceptualizing violence that recognize its significance, independent of the scale of any single incident; appreciate the links between laws, public policy, and physical assault; and identify the webs of complicity between the state, political parties, and civil society.

NEHA DIXIT is an independent journalist working from Delhi, India. Her journalism revolves around the themes of Hindu nationalism, gender, and social justice in South Asia, and her work has been published in several leading media outlets including The Wire, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Outlook, and Caravan. Her published works are available online at http://neha-dixit.blogspot.com/. Neha has won numerous awards for her work, including the International Press Freedom Award (2019), the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism (2014), the European Commission's Lorenzo Natali Media Prize (2011), and the Chameli Devi Jain Award for Outstanding Woman Journalist (2016).

NAKUL SAWHNEY is an independent documentary filmmaker. His work has largely focused on issues of human rights, gender, communalism, labour rights, caste, and social justice. Prominent films include Izzatnagari ki Asabhya Betiyaan (Immoral Daughters in the Land of Honour) and Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai (Muzaffarnagar Eventually). He founded and is currently running a film and media collective, ChalChitra Abhiyaan, based in western Uttar Pradesh.

Tell us about how you have engaged with Hindu nationalism in your work.

NAKUL: I think my involvement with Hindutva politics goes back to 2010 when I started working on Izzatnagari ki Asabhya Betiyaan, which is set in the Jat belt, largely in Haryana (Sawhney 2011). It's a film that looks at crimes and killings in the name of honour and the resistance by young women against self-styled caste authorities, the khap panchayats which are passing diktats against self-choice marriages. When I look at it in retrospect, I think that the sort of Jat identity politics that was deeply anti-women and anti-Dalit created a fertile ground for Hindutva to flourish in west Uttar Pradesh (UP) and in Haryana as well.

I then worked on several other documentaries set in west UP. Muzaffarnagar Baaqi Hai looks at the Muzaffarnagar massacre of 2013. The film explores the various social, political, and economic reasons and fallouts of the massacre. A film screening was attacked by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), on 1 August 2015 at Kirori Mal College in Delhi University. The film was subsequently screened in many parts of the country to oppose the disruption at Delhi University. Several other screenings were also stopped and attacked by right-wing goons and local police. Dalit scholar and activist Rohith Vemula had also organized a screening at Hyderabad Central University (HCU).

Around the mid-nineteenth century, some of Calcutta's most densely populated bustees were located in the area bound by Cotton Street in the north, Canning Street in the south, Halliday Street in the east, and Brabourne Road in the west. These bustees were inhabited predominantly by poor Muslim tenants, but some rich Muslim Momin and Sarti merchants from Bombay also lived among them in more substantial dwelling houses. Although there had been a steady displacement of Muslims from the area because of slum clearance from the 1880s onwards, and affluent Muslim merchant families were also losing their presence in the area's trade profile, the construction of Harrison Road by the Municipal Corporation in the 1890s precipitated an extraordinary transformation of these neighbourhoods. This dense settlement of the city's poor turned into prime urban property almost overnight.

Buoyancy in the locality's real estate market brought on by the Harrison Road Scheme led to dramatic demographic upheavals in the heart of the city, thus creating conditions for social conflicts. Around this time, the city was also witnessing the emergence of mass nationalist and working-class politics, and the ways in which that impacted the nature and popular perceptions of urban space. In this chapter, I intend to show how the discourses and practices of property (shaped by colonial civic institutions) on the one hand and mobilizational politics on the other interfaced in the making of the urban milieu of early-twentieth-century Calcutta.

The Story of the Mosque near Harrison Road

In the late 1840s, Din Mahomed, a coachman of the wealthy Muslim city merchant Haji Zakaria, had built a small mosque in the southern portion of Armenian Street with his fellow syces and coachmen. A bustee of poor Muslim tenants, covering approximately 3 bighas of land, was located right opposite Din Mahomed's Mosque, on the north side on Amratola Street. In 1890, the Municipal Corporation initiated the construction of the new Harrison Road in the vicinity of the bustee. Drawn to the changing prospects of this area on account of its proximity to the projected new road, in 1902 or 1903, a Marwari firm, Gopi Ram Bhagat Ram, and a wealthy Muslim merchant, A. M. Ishabhai, bought over one half of the bustee each, for a total price of 110,000 rupees. Bhagat Ram built a four-storeyed mansion for his family on his share of the plot.

This chapter explores the question of how the large, complex paddy-rice market in Bangladesh was able to transform itself and evolve in the face of changing risks and incentives into a better-functioning market system. It notes significant but opposing trends over two decades in different areas, particularly in terms of market structure, trade circuits and exchange relations. Evidence of a sharp decline in tied transactions points to the growing importance of impersonal exchange. Underlying causes of these changes are explored with particular reference to microfinance, remittances, rural roads, mobile telephony and mobile financial services (MFS).

Much has changed in the rural economy in recent decades: the micro-credit revolution has matured, remittances have grown enormously, mobile phones have brought on an information revolution in the country and there have been major transformative changes in health, education, especially girls’ education, and physical infrastructure.

We explore the Bangladesh paddy-rice market, which has tended to be described variously as traditional, backward, complex, hierarchical, interlocked and exploitative, on the one hand, and well integrated, competitive and efficient on the other (Ravallion 1986, 1987; Baulch et al. 1998; Dawson and Dey 2002; Goletti, Ahmed and Farid 1995). In actual practice, the rice market displays elements of both aspects, with some backward areas associated with complex forms of tied exchange á la Crow and Murshid (CM henceforth) (1994), while other more advanced areas display a much more competitive outcome based on increasingly less personalized transactions.

The central message of this chapter is that the huge paddy-rice market is not static but is constantly changing, adapting and evolving into a better-functioning market system. In particular, the backward forms that have been well noted are in recession, and over the course of the last several decades various forms of tied finance have been dramatically reduced. It is suggested that the improvements in agricultural performance – especially in rice production and, broadly, in the rural socio-economic regime marked by exogenous developments in infrastructure, mobile telephony and MFS, and rural finance – have played a significant role in transforming rural markets.

An alternative strategy for studying economic development in the Punjab is by examining the problem of indebtedness in relation to institutional change and economic reform. The Punjab was the richest province of colonial India, its breadbasket as well as the major recruiting ground for the Imperial army. For these reasons, the political and financial stability of the province were key objectives of the colonial state. Indebtedness in the province was also conceptualized by officials in a way that maintained the status quo and did not threaten the maintenance of law and order or the payment of land revenue. To the official mind, the chief economic issue for the Punjab peasantry was that of indebtedness. Not only did peasant indebtedness propel legal changes and administrative action but particular colonial officers also became heavily involved with initiating reforms to combat it. In some ways, indebtedness emerged from the commissioning of the range of property documents mentioned earlier that made land holdings in the Punjab assessable.

The role of human resources in a country's development journey is crucial in supporting high-value agriculture, industry and services. We saw earlier that Bangladesh had chalked up considerable gains in social outcomes, especially in certain key indicators related to family planning, health, primary education, nutrition and women's empowerment. In fact, the most commented upon achievements of Bangladesh relates to its successes in the social sectors. Pointing to widely available governance indicators and corruption scores, especially emanating from the World Bank and Transparency International, observers have struggled to reconcile these positive social outcomes to the disappointing performance in governance. This struggle intensified further given the relatively small public resources that were deployed to social sector programmes over the years (Chowdhury and Osmani 2010; Asadullah, Savoia and Mahmud 2014). The question to ponder over, therefore, is how these much-vaunted social outcomes were achieved, given acute resource constraints, poor political and economic governance and an uncertain aid regime within an unstable and depressed socio-economic environment.

The explanations attempted have generally referred to non-governmental actors, aid-supported interventions, low-cost solutions, attitudinal and behavioural changes, role of community organizations and a generally supportive role of the government.

Thus, Chowdhury et al. (2013) attribute the health sector performance to pluralistic health systems, women-focused interventions, family planning, oral rehydration therapy and immunization programmes, effectively delivered by trained community healthcare workers.

Asadullah, Savoia and Mahmud (2014) found no evidence to suggest that the performance was income mediated or support led, as some had indicated and suggested that an inclusive approach combined with government and NGO efforts ‘in all social sectors’ were responsible: successful awareness campaigns were launched, low-cost innovations helped reduce fertility and child mortality rates, and gender parity in education was achieved through, for example, the ‘Female Secondary School Stipend’ programme.

Introduction

On 5 August 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation for the controversial Ram Temple in Ayodhya by performing bhumi puja (groundbreaking ceremony) amid a massive surge of coronavirus cases. According to various media accounts, soil and water were collected from different pilgrimage sites, which Lord Ram allegedly visited, unifying India through a sacred geography of myth and ritual (North East Now 2020). Members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Dolloi, village chief of Jowai, Meghalaya collected soil and water from the River Myntdu according to the ritual of the indigenous Niamtre faith (Manosh 2020). Myntdu is not only a river sacred to the indigenous people, but it is also the place where the Jaintia rebellion started against the British led by U Kiang Nangbah (Manosh 2020).

According to the RSS pracharak Gaurav Tiwari, the Niamtre people of Meghalaya worship ‘Ram and Lakhan (Lakshman)’. Since time immemorial, they naturalise the region's long mythological connection to Bharat (India) that includes Rukmini (allegedly from Arunachal Pradesh), Krishna's consort, and other figures from the Mahabharata (Longkumer 2020). The RSS believes soil and water to be integral elements upon which identities and histories are materialised. Varied responses were aired on Facebook about how this act of collecting soil and water plays on the larger Hindutva idea of cultural appropriation on the one hand and the argument that all indigenous faiths are, in some way, a part of the larger Hindu cultural and religious universe on the other. The natural features (mountains, rivers, soil, and land), places of pilgrimage, and ritual spaces act as material evidence that ground the Northeast to Bharatvarsh through ‘earth’ (bhumi). In fact, a Vivekananda Kendra worker in Arunachal Pradesh, Narendra Joshi (2000, 7), draws on V. D. Savarkar's notion of Hindutva to establish these connections:

Throughout its colonial history, Calcutta had been a Hindu-majority city in the heart of a Muslim-majority province. Until the mid-twentieth century, despite bitter rivalry, the city's Hindu and Muslim populations inhabited shared spaces, even in areas populated chiefly by members of one community. In such localities, there were scattered pockets where people of the other community resided, creating a complex inter-communal sharing of neighbourhoods, infrastructures, and resources. Ghettos did not manifest to the extent they do today. However, the city's character began to transform slowly in the interwar decades due to the twin effects of urban renewal and communal mobilization, culminating in an utter territorial defeat of Muslims in the mid-twentieth century. One of the outcomes of this was ghetto formation in the city's margins. While ghettoization is a violent process, ghettos are also kept in place through violence.

This chapter looks at how the police as an apparatus of public order ‘read’ the city as a communally divided territory in moments of civil unrest. It also demonstrates how the cop–mob dialectic redrew, reinforced, and refunctioned the internal boundaries of the city. In this negotiation between the police and the mob, the street emerged both as a territory and as a zoning device. At the same time, the street (and the spatial order of the city) also shaped the tactics and the outcome of this urban warfare. In this light, I examine the police evidence of a series of communal occurrences spanning the first half of the twentieth century—including a communal civil war in 1946. In doing so, I track social infrastructures that developed around these riots and various forms of mass politics that further enforced the territorial reordering of Calcutta in the first half of the century. Finally, the chapter analyses the implications of these zoning exercises for the emergence of an internally segregated city in the post-colonial period. The discussion that follows examines the street and the ghetto as two distinct configurations of territory that frame the spatial reconfigurations of this period.

The Mob–Cop Dialectic

As discussed in Chapter 2, one of the areas affected by the Harrison Road Scheme, roughly bound by Cotton Street in the north, Canning Street in the south, Halliday Street in the east, and Brabourne Road in the west, became the nerve centre of the 1910 Bakr-Id riot.