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Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928

University of California Press

The rise of nationalism, the development of self-governing institutions, the expansion of anticolonial protest, the emergence of intense ethnic and religious conflicts—these have been the "grand"themes in the historiography of colonial societies.1 The centrality of these themes in the writing of Asian and African history suggests that the colonial experience everywhere involved great changes in indigenous cultures of politics. Under the domination of European imperialism, the colonized altered their perceptions of the political world in fundamental ways, modifying their notions of authority, reformulating their conceptions of justice, and often forging new identities.

For students of global history, India has often served as a paradigm for understanding political change under colonial rule. The largest contemporary nation of Asia or Africa to have undergone colonial rule, it was the first to develop a "modern" nationalist organization: the Indian National Congress, founded in 1885. India had a rich history of popular protest against imperialism, culminating in the three giant campaigns led by Mahatma Gandhi between the 1920s and the 1940s. It also had a very long history of development in self-governing institutions, beginning with local municipalities and district local boards introduced by British civil servants after the mid–nineteenth century, and leading up to the creation of a parliamentary government in 1947. Accompanying the rise of nationalism and the emergence of India's liberal representative system was a process that has always been less positively evaluated in historical writings: the emergence of communal conflicts, particularly between Hindus and Muslims. As is well known, the intensification of religious communalism ultimately led to the division of British India into the separate countries of India and Pakistan,

as well as to the tragic events of 194—48, when hundreds of thousands of South Asians lost their lives in bloody rioting.

Until the last ten years, it was these processes—the growth of nationalism, of representative forms of self-government, and of communalism—that most preoccupied historians of late colonial South Asia. Central to their concerns was the chief subject of this book: the incorporation of nationalist, democratic, and communalist concepts into the political values of educated Indians. The outlines of this story are fairly well known. During the nineteenth century, a small group of men, anxious to prove their worth to their British rulers but also intent on questioning their rulers' policies, began to appropriate the notions of "nationalism," "representative government," and (later) "socialism," all principles originating in the political discourse of Western Europe. The "English-educated elite" assumed command over the top rungs of the Indian National Congress from its beginnings, guiding the country in the decolonization process, giving shape to its constitution, and setting the general contours of state ideology. In the period following independence, the continued commitment of this elite to liberal, representative, and nationalist institutions enabled India's democracy to withstand the increasingly intense conflicts between communities organized around region, religion, and caste.

Today some scholars apparently consider these issues exhausted and see little point in raising them again. They have turned to the study of social and economic structure and, more recently, of popular resistance. A few, by dismissing the traditional questions of political historiography as "elitist",have even attempted to strip these concerns of much of their legitimacy.2 Yet many of the same historians would recognize that the older models that used to explain the emergence of India's liberal representative values have serious shortcomings. And they would also acknowledge that an understanding of this process is necessary in order to appreciate the character of the contemporary political order, especially the reasons it has failed to meet the needs of India's underclasses.

This study turns again to the historical examination of the development of India's liberal political system and of the liberal, democratic value system of its English-educated elite by focusing on a single urban center, the city of Surat in western India. The questions it asks are familiar to Indian historians. Why did Indian elites appropriate liberal and national concepts during late colonial rule? Why did communal identities and conceptions of justice crystallize and intensify at the same time as the emergence of democratic discourse? Why did discussion and debate in the central arenas of politics become confined to these two idioms—the liberal-democratic and the communal? Perhaps most

important, how did the language of democracy, despite its seeming advocacy of the equality and rights of the underclasses, serve to exclude these classes from full-fledged participation in forging India's contemporary polity?

While many of the questions I examine here are traditional ones, the approach I use to examine them is not. Rather than draw upon the standard tools of political history, I wish here to apply the methodology of ethnohistory. The study borrows from anthropology the concern with the construction of cultural meaning, the process by which human beings create and reproduce their understandings of the world in the course of social action. In the pages that follow, I explore the symbolic behavior—the rhetoric and the ritual—of leaderships in Surat as they interacted with their political overlords. The focus on politics as symbolic action and discursive practice will allow me to question interpretative models that suggest that the entry of democratic values into the language of elite politics was an outgrowth of forces external to the political process, such as "westernization," "modernization," and the "emergence of capitalism." Instead, I argue that day-to-day struggles for power and justice under colonial domination were themselves the most significant engines of cultural change.

This study departs from most existing political history in another way, also influenced by anthropological approaches. While most works touching upon questions of political ideology in India explore either national-level organizations or leaders of national, or at least regional, prominence, often during a rather short period, I choose to examine a specific locality over a long time. For those familiar with the history of Indian politics, the choice of Surat as a subject for this inquiry may seem an especially odd one for a work that claims to describe a dynamic characteristic of large areas of the subcontinent. The city and the region surrounding it produced no leaders of national stature until the rise of Morarji Desai, a native of the southern Gujarat region (and later prime minister of India), during the 1930s. With the exception of the famous Indian National Congress meetings of 1907, an event that will receive little attention in this work, Surat has never been especially well known for its contributions to the nationalist struggle or the history of communalism. Why not, one might ask (and, indeed, I have been asked), concentrate instead on national-level actors operating in national arenas? The...