Beth Roy

Some Trouble with Cows


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couldn't you stop them?” It had been his choice to stay back with the Muslims. After that I took the Muslims back to their side. Because there was a fire in the haystack, the Hindus couldn't stay silent. They, too, started to come into the field with their weapons, dhal katra [weapons of war]. I was running from one side to the other….

      By ten o'clock in the morning, there were almost ten thousand people, altogether ten thousand on two sides. Now I no longer have enough courage to go to the Hindu side, because there are many unknown Hindus coming from other places. They won't recognize me, so they might strike me. My identity as a Muslim was quite visible. I wore this long kurta and toupee and beard. I was all along asking the Muslims to stop. But they wouldn't listen to me.

      Who started the fire in the haystack was a point of some controversy among subsequent informants. Altaf's story placed responsibility on the Muslims' side, but his fiercest blame was for the police officer. He had chosen to stay with the Muslims and yet had failed to control them. It is not clear whether Altaf meant to suggest complicity, or simple incompetence. Certainly he was telling me that he himself was not responsible, since the police officer had directed him to the Hindus. In any case, once the Muslims moved, the Hindus, in his version, had no choice but to retaliate.

      With the fire Altaf retreated to the side of his co-religionists: “I quickly left, afraid that they [the Hindus] could harm me, too, because I am a Muslim.” Still, he continued to run from side to side, until the numbers grew so large he feared that his reputation could no longer protect him. Too many among the mob were strangers. All the symbols of his person—his beard, kurta, and cap—identified him as Muslim, not as chairman. His influence over the rioters was at an end.

      What Altaf described here was a clear point of demarcation in the progress of the riot. Local authority had lost its meaning as the crowd grew to include people from other localities. No longer was the fight about particular issues; it had become engulfed in something else, something that drew on more universal passions. It had become a “communal riot.”

      The Namasudras

      When we finally left Basantibala's house, we headed to the homestead of Sunil Mondal, a Namasudra farmer and a representative of the third force in the drama. Our boat left the river and took us through the paddy fields. Now and then it became entangled in lilies or beached on a rise. But the boatman, with considerable lament and heroic effort, literally pulled us through. At last we landed on a steep and muddy bank at a homestead. We were still in Panipur Union, at a village called Shirachi. We walked past outbuildings and through yards filled with jute-green, cut jute in piles; jute poles bunched teepee-style to dry; jute fiber in huge skeins. Everywhere women and men were working. The women wore sarees, short and wrapped around their breasts, with no blouses. In the parting of their hair was the vermilion mark. One young woman was arranging food in front of a statue of Lakshmi, the elegant Hindu goddess of wealth.

      At the third or fourth courtyard we came upon an older man, short, muscular, wearing a lungi hiked to his knees; he moved with efficient energy to finish his task of arranging jute skeins in the sun, and then he ushered us into a tiny outer room off the yard. The room was bare except for two wooden chairs and a bench, a large clay pot containing paddy, and a basket filled with some sort of seed, probably jute. The floor was covered with the beautiful, curved patterns of mud generally used to keep village homes tidy. Balancing the tape recorder on my lap, I asked Sunil about his farm. He began by bemoaning the declining fertility of the land. In his childhood, he said:

      Crops were abundant, and people were well off and there were fewer of them. Food was plentiful. But now we don't get that much crop. We get a fourth of what we used to get. The land that used to produce one maund [in Panipur, a little over eighty pounds] now hardly yields ten seers [about twenty pounds]. The fertility has gone down that much.

       Why has the fertility reduced so much?

      Because of the silting of the river, we don't get the rich soil we used to in the floods.

      As we settled in to talk, people wandered in and sat down. Sunil told us he owned about fifteen acres of land, a fair-sized farm in these parts, and that his farm had changed over the years :

      I had people working for me, three or four men; I paid them a salary. I worked along with them.

       Have you ever had any sharecroppers or subtenants?

      No, not then. Now I have sharecroppers. Because now I can't get good, sincere workers. These workers don't want to work on a monthly basis, only on a daily basis. It's more expensive that way.

       When you used to hire workers, were they Hindu or Muslim?

      They were all Hindus. Hindus had Hindu workers, Muslims had Muslim workers. The hired workers, too, would only seek work from people of their own community.

       Why did you hire only Hindus?

      I searched for Hindu workers because the person I kept on a monthly basis lived with us as a member of my family, so he had to be Hindu.

      On a daily basis, it doesn't matter whether they are Hindu or Muslim. They work for the day, then they go away. When the work was greatest, I would hire both Hindus and Muslims on a daily basis.

       What kinds of problems would you have staying with Muslim laborers?

      Eating, going to the kitchen, because the person who would work here would be a member of my family. He has to have access to each and every corner of my house. In the case of Muslims, there's a communal difference. For instance, we won't let him touch the altar of the goddess Lakshmi.

       What's the problem with eating?

      Muslims take onion and beef. But we don't eat those things.…We don't use the glasses or plates used by others. Also, we don't touch the leftover food of others. But they don't have those same prejudices, they don't care. We care, they don't care. There are some Muslims who mind, but nowadays not many have that attitude.

      Sunil clearly expressed a religiously based sense of community, identifying himself as a Hindu in distinction to Muslims. But Sunil was a Namasudra, a person of low caste, and himself subject to discriminatory rules of precisely the same sort from Hindus above him in the caste system.

       History of a Tribe

      The history of Bangladesh, and especially of this western district bordering India, is a drama with three characters: the Muslims, the caste Hindus, and a variety of low—or outcaste peoples and tribes who stood in the wings socially but center stage dramatically.

      In the days of the British Empire, the Faridpur district population consisted of unequal numbers of Hindus and Muslims, and most of the former were Namasudras. Cultivators and artisans, they shared more customs and traits with their Muslim neighbors than with the caste Hindus who were landlords and moneylenders to both.

      The origins and fortunes of the Namasudra community are interwoven with the history of the land. It is impossible to understand the character of these people without an image of the territory they occupy. Faridpur defies intuitive concepts of a fixed landscape. Growing up on the American continent, I had always relied on geology to stay put. “The land” as an expression was to me a metaphor for solidity, agelessness, groundedness. To be sure, I understood theoretically that the land had a history, but I believed that it moved in geological time, which is to say, so slowly as to be irrelevant. Bangladesh reeducated me. Time after time, people would point to some solid-seeming expanse of land many miles from anything wet and say, “Only a few years ago we used to catch the ferry here.” Rivers wander, villages disappear overnight, and new lands appear, fertilely beckoning to litigious farmers.

      I had thought I understood about the rivers. Only slowly, though, as I learned the histories of the people settled here and as I traveled from one distinct geographic area to another only a few miles distant, did I come fully to comprehend what a living, changing thing this land is and how much its changes interacted with the histories of the peoples occupying it.

      The Namasudras were historically fishermen and