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essay

Some Aspects of Nationalism of the Bengalis — VII

by Serajul Islam Choudhury
THE story of nationalism has been, as this brief overview shows, one in which friends and foes were working for and against the people. The enemies have been four — communalism, class, gender-discrimination. and, of course, the state. They are still working. The friends were drawn from the middle class as were many of the enemies. And It was from this class that the leftists, who were declared friends of the people, came. But unfortunately the leftists were not in the leadership of the nationalist movement, which is one of the main reasons why the movement did not achieve its ultimate purpose of making a social revolution possible. The nationalist movement has made compromises with the imperialists and allowed itself to be dominated by the re-actlorTtes who have continued to divide the people Instead of uniting them and have forestalled, quite successfully, a radical social change from happening. The situation would have been very different had the left been in leadership of the nationalist movement.
The left was expected to be de-classed. secular and uncompromising. Its leadership, not unexpectedly, was drawn from the middle class. What was wrong was not so much the genesis of the leadership as its failure to go beyond some of Its class characteristics, even when enormous sacrifices were being made by its members at the individual level.
There was in the left leadership the
middle class propensity to depend on others, in this case on the paternal (rather than fraternal) communist parties — first, of the Soviet Union and. later, also of the People s Republic of China. The supposed liberators were not themselves liberated. This foreign dependence was one of the causes why the Communist Party of India was unable to grasp and handle the nationalist urge and aspiration of the people. The flaw was particularly and almost disastrously manifest during the crucial period of 1-941-45 when the nationalist movement had reached its height. The Communist Party kept itself aloof from the flow and, in fact, stood against it. simply because by that time the Soviet Union had become an ally of Britain owing to Hitler's invasion of its terri tory.
Besides, all along the history of its struggle, the Communist Party of India, and later of Pakistan as well, had failed to link up the class struggle with the struggle for national liberation. That the principal contradiction in a colonial state was bound to be between the subjugated people and the occupying state and that the class question could not emerge clearly and completely unless and until the national question was resolved were facts lost sight of by the communist leadership.
Mao's ready example of the communists' being qualified, more than the ostensible nationalists, to be the real and the most uncompromising vanguard of the national war of liberation against foreign occupation did not have an adequate impact on the leadership.
The leftists could, and should, have offered a clear-cut and credible alternative to what the Indian Congress and the Muslim League wanted to achieve, and that alternative should have been nationalist in form and socialist in content. It did not do that; consequently despite the respect that the leftists as individuals had won. their movement was incapable of drawing the masses. Moreover, the party leadership suffered from petty bourgeois restlessness of swinging from one extreme of near-pacifism to the other of extreme of violence. from the mass Une to the line of Insurrection, and vice versa.
The party was urban, and drew its workers from students, educated youths and professionals. The population lived in the villages, where the bhadralok leadership of the left did not cultivate. And it is profoundly ironical that the rent-receiving and exploitative leadership of the Congress and the League had established a greater closeness to the peasantry than the Communist Party was able to develop. The rightists spoke on issues which were visible and easily identifiable; and they spoke in the language the peasantry understood. The despair that occurred among the communists In the sub-continent after the collapse of the Communist bloc was, among other things, indicative of the fact that they were not rooted deeply in the people, in whose struggle for existence there was no room for despair.
The left movement also suffered because of the opposition from the reac-tionarles, and among the strategies they
enacted was the one that the Brahmins had used In driving out the Buddhists from Bengal, namely, branding the adversary with the stigma of atheism. In a culture where dependence on the supernatural was endemic because of the helplessness of the people, the strategy did not fail. And the leftists themselves were unable to counter this propaganda as also to make the people they were working among realize that secularism and atheism were, as ideologies, wide apart from each other. Theoretically, the leftists were the real nationalists; for whereas others worked for community and class they promoted the cause of the entire people, who constituted the real nation. The left elements had emotion and devotion in plenty, but were limited because of these very qualities.
Therefore, the nationalist movement in Bengal remained essentially and almost irredeemably middle-class in character. The linguistic basis worked, but only to a limited extent. For even in that area the middle-class predilections promoted separation. The educated middle class was bi-lingual, and they were boastful, not always quietly, of their English education which had given them Jobs, power and status not enjoyed by the rest of the community. The Bengali middle class, we recall, has had an earlier start of 50 years In respect of learning English, compared with those in the other provinces in India. In the Bengali language itself the communal divide had entered because of the competition between the two communities in displaying their re-
spective power and authority. This was to add to the already existing divisions between the chaste and the vulgar, the general and the local. At a different level, the Bengali language became the property of the middle class as a whole, to Ute deprivation of the vast majority of the population who remained uneducated. The Bengali Intelligentsia overemphasized the value of literature, which is the most important reason why in the culture of Bengal literature occupies a place much weightier than other branches of the arts. The British government required the young ICS officers to acquire suitable knowledge of English literature before making their voyage to India. The acquisition, it was expected, would give them a sense of pride and a protection of insulation against any possible contamination by local culture. The Bengali middle class derived a similar pride from their possession of a literature which was written in language not spoken by the common folk. Literature was also an insulation for the educated.
Writing in 1930, S Wajed All, a nationalist writer, made a prophecy to the effect that it is in the fertile soil of East Bengal that a real Bengali state and society is expected to grow. For that what is needed is a national awakening, he said. We agree. But who should lead? Wajed All thought of the man of the age Rabindranath, we recall, had looked up to a (a leader of the
country). At one time, he thought of two and not one — each representing a community. But the history we have
been looking at tells us. that it is not a person, but the entire nation who must do the Job.
History has given East Bengal a role to play. It has set up a state which is secular in commitment; and secularism is the first pre-requisite for the achievement of democratic nationalism. In Bengal nationalism began to grow in the nineteenth century as a secular phenomenon, but, as we have seen, secularism was disturbed by revivalism and communalism. Even the terrorist revolutionaries of Bengal were, at the beginning, reluctant to include Muslim youths in their organisation. a fact mourned, among many, by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the nationalist Muslim leader. And nationalism to be democratic must also be able to encounter and subdue the forces of class-division and gender-discrimination.
The Job is collective, it must draw all into its flow, but the leadership would come from the Intellectuals, who by the very obligation of their task, have to be secular, democratic and de-classed in their commitments. The fruitfulness of their work will depend on the participation of the masses, to whom they must go not merely to educate but also to be educated. There has to be a unity which would have the vision and the courage to go against the current of capitalism, which is now seeking to submerge the world both economically and ideologically, wiping out national identities. The current is strong, but the desire to survive, we hope, is stronger.