[Their] Hinduisation possibly took place at a comparatively late period, when the caste system had taken its fully developed shape and outsiders were admitted reluctantly and only at the bottom of the structure. This explains, to a large extent, the social degradations [they] were subjected to.…Many branded them as the “lowest of mankind,”…whose touch defiles the pure.21
But in the nineteenth century, life began to change for the Namasudras. First, the swamps receded, leaving behind many square miles of fertile new farmland. This alteration in the natural and economic terrain was accomplished by British engineers, who cut a series of roads and drainage canals through the region, a land-reclamation project of gigantic proportions.
Traveling about Faridpur district is a journey into the lives of the waterways. Boats ply them, carrying passengers, jute, fish, and every other essential of village life. Bridges over them wash away in frequent floods. People bathe in them. Women launder clothing and small boys fish in them. Rural development projects are built on their banks. In the days of Empire, the waterways of Faridpur were a favorite topic for letters home from British officials and their wives. In 1884 Lady Beveridge wrote to her children a long account of a journey by boat through the domain of her husband, a district magistrate:
When we first started we were in a narrow river and our way lay through fields of rice without many houses but afterwards we came into a wider river and there were many houses on the banks each standing in its own grove of fruit trees. The country is flat and only a little above the water so that it is easy to see how bad the great storm waves must be when they come up from the sea and run over the land.22
In 1920 Lt. Col. L. N. Bavin described his adventures in the same territory in terms a good deal less favorable:
[It] was a terrible spot.…I used to tour about that country in a primitive houseboat called a budgerow, braving these perilous waterways, creeping up narrow creeks that wound on for miles from one river to another, crossing huge seas where you could get out of sight of land, and calling in at villages that were untouched by the waves of world upheavals.23
One can always tell canals from natural waterways: the latter wander all over the place; the former travel straight on for mile after mile. It is difficult to imagine the countryside without the canals, and easy to imagine what a difference was made by their construction. Their banks act as dams and their courses drain the channeled waters, leaving behind relatively dry land. Between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the area under cultivation rose from less than fifty percent of the total to almost eighty.24
To the lives of the Namasudras these canals made a profound difference. They opened up the possibilities of cultivation, and that transformation promised not only economic betterment but also a path to higher social status. Peasants enjoyed considerably more respect than boatmen and fishermen like the Namasudras. But little of the new ownership actually devolved on Namasudras. In the 1891 census, only fifty-seven Namasudras in Faridpur were reported to occupy land they did not themselves till; they constituted 0.04 percent of the Namasudra population. Even twenty years later, in the 1911 census, fewer than 1 percent of all Namasudras in Bengal owned enough land to receive rents.25 Namasudras farmed the land, but caste Hindus and some few Muslims owned it. What a given peasant farmed, moreover, was very little indeed, whether he was Namasudra or Muslim. By the end of the 1930s, 64 percent of Faridpur cultivators held less than two acres a family—a far greater level of economic deprivation than in many other parts of Bengal.26
Nonetheless, enough of the new lands reclaimed in the late nineteenth century were possessed by Namasudras to solidify a very small affluent class. But social uplift did not automatically devolve from economic improvement, so a campaign to upgrade the status of their community was launched by the newly well-off among them in 1872.27 As Rajat Kanta Ray points out:
Hindu society in Bengal treated other untouchable castes…with equal contempt. But in the case of the Namasudras their low ritual status coincided with an unusual amount of spirit and independence which did not make for tame submission.28
The Namasudras' first attack was on social customs that made them vulnerable to contempt. Women, for instance, always markers of status and power, were prohibited from shopping in the bazar, for only low-class people allowed their women to appear in public. An attempt was also made to attack the economic basis of subordination; Namasudras were prohibited by their community from serving in the homes of caste Hindus or Muslims. The resulting economic hardship was, in theory at least, to be redressed by the community at large. Finally, ritual status markers were adopted. As Sunil suggested, food is primary among these, and Namasudras adopted ritual codes of purity paralleling those of the higher castes.
In time, these symbolic and economic efforts at uplift altered the political landscape of the province, bringing Namasudras and Muslims closer together. New political alliances emerged:
By the 1910's, the high-caste, well-to-do Hindus were sharply polarized from the Muslim-Namasudra masses. Henceforth the peasants, especially the enfranchised section, defied the zamindars and the Hindu bhadralok classes in different ways.29
When the demand for a separate Muslim state was raised in 1940, Bengal was one of the more problematic provinces, since its population was close to evenly divided between the communities. Hard negotiating was employed to determine its destiny: did it belong by rights to Hindu-majority India or to Muslim-majority Pakistan? Sentiments ran strong and violent on both sides. In Calcutta, the mammoth capital city to the southwest of Faridpur, Hindus and Muslims slaughtered each other, and violence seeped into some of the larger towns of East Bengal as well.
In this charged context it was extraordinarily significant for an entire Hindu community to opt for Pakistan. But that is just what the East Bengali Namasudras did, defining their interests on the basis of class, not religion, and confounding expectations that Hindus all over India were united in their desire for undivided nationhood. Their future, these Namasudras believed, would be brighter in a state devoid of high-caste landlords than in one ruled by people who shared their religion but nonetheless oppressed them. As I questioned Sunil about the changes in his community, he told me the history of the alliance between Namasudras and Muslims:
In 1947, when there was Independence, many Hindus wondered, “Will we be able to live in peace in Pakistan?”' The caste Hindus left this land for India at the beginning. But our middle-class people and peasants didn't want to go. Our—what's his name?—Mandal, a very big man: Jogen Mandal [leader of an association of Scheduled Caste peoples]! Our Jogen Mandal made an alliance with Jinnah [the founding father of Pakistan]. Many of us believed then, “Let the caste Hindus go, but those of us who are peasants, whether Hindus or Muslims, can live together as brothers.”…
The sense of a division that we felt earlier was gone, because of what that minister [Mandal] said. We gained confidence that truly we could live together as brothers.
Group Identities, Solid and Fluid
Sunil's language is revealing. When he referred to “us,” he identified his community as peasants, not as Hindus or Muslims. Indeed, he specifically excluded the religious identifier as being relevant: “those of us who are peasants, whether Hindus or Muslims” But those whom he would just as soon see leave the country he identified as “caste Hindus,” not as landlords. “Peasants” opposed “caste Hindus”; not once throughout his long interview did Sunil use the name Namasudra. It was “middle-class people and peasants” who chose to stay in Bangladesh. When he did use religious-community signifiers, he stood the more common relationship between group and subgroup on its head. Everyone else used the name Hindu to mean something generic presumably organized around the centrality of those of caste and then designated the minority as Namasudra. Hindu meant the whole, Namasudra the particular, those with noteworthy differences. Only Sunil used the name Hindu generically and differentiated the subgroup