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Some Trouble with Cows

University of California Press

“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, poor relations of the local zamindar, or large landlord. Their two spacious rooms were crammed with possessions. Old blankets hung from rafters; age-faded 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.

We [Hindus and Muslims] were good friends. We played together. We read in the same schools together. We were on the same football teams.

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.

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.

Our party included a young woman who assisted me in most of the interviews with interpretation and questions, and a staff member from the development organization hosting me, who happened to live in the village. Throughout my account I use “I” or “we” not quite indiscriminately; sometimes I mean to suggest the importance of the entourage (as in this scene in Basantibala’s house) or some question that evolved from a discussion between my assistant and me. I use “I” when an exchange was truly between me and the respondent.

A dhoti is the male equivalent of a saree; it is an unstitched piece of fabric worn draped as pants. Clothing signifies community; only Hindus, and upper-caste ones at that, wear dhotis.

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;...