Map 1. Asia and environs
Map 2. South and Southeast Asia
Map 3. Bangladesh
Map 4. The village of Panipur
The Cast of Characters
(presented in order of appearance)
| Basantibala Majumdar | The widow of a cousin of the zamindar of Panipur; matriarch of a large, extended Hindu family, the poor gentility of the village | |
| Sujit Ghosh | Basantibala's neighbor, a small landowner and a caste Hindu | |
| Altaf-uddin | The elected chairman of Panipur Union, a Muslim and a major player in the riot | |
| Sunil Mondal | A middle-aged Namasudra (low-caste Hindu) farmer, owner of land sufficient to necessitate hired help and lucrative enough to enable him to send his sons to university | |
| Raghu Nandan | A Hindu police officer who fought in the riot | |
| Mofizuddin | A Muslim farmer with holdings roughly comparable to Sunil's; an old man who fought in the riot and is now a matabbar of the village | |
| Nayeb Ali | Mofizuddin's friend, also a Muslim, a little older and of comparable worth and status | |
| Kumar Tarkhania | Appearing only by reputation, the Namasudra farmer whose crop was eaten; he subsequently migrated to India and died there | |
| Golam Fakir | A Muslim farmer with small holdings, the owner of the wayward cow | |
| Jogendra Pal | A Hindu elder who tried to intervene in the riot | |
| Bhupendranath | An educated Namasudra man living at Panipur | |
| Sidheshwar Tarkhania | A Muslim who participated in the riot | |
| Sona Miah | A retired Muslim government officer and amateur historian from a northern district |
Introduction
In a remote village somewhere in South Asia, someone's cow ate someone else's crop. Within two days, tens of thousands of men were ranged against each other, armed, hostile, righteous.
Who those men were, how they chose sides, the symbolic choreography of their fight, were all particular to that village. But an inclination to confrontation is widespread. Social conflict is a durable fact of life throughout the world, from the back alleys of Belfast to the urban canyons of New York City, from the dusty pathways of Israeli settlements to the public squares of Lithuania.
The need to understand why some groups of people define others as Other, how enemies are made, why conflicts often turn so brutal, is not politely academic. As, I suspect, with most enduring questions of scholarship, the personal and the political merge urgently in these questions. Born an American Jew during the Holocaust, reared on the Korean War and the McCarthy hearings, come to adulthood in a segregated southwestern city during the first throes of the civil rights movement, I, like most citizens of this century, experienced conflict as an assumed part of life. Perhaps it was no accident that I chose mediation as a career, nor that I came to wonder more and more, as the years of helping people resolve conflict rolled on, about the nature of animosity.
So much enmity appears in the modern world that it is tempting to ascribe it to human nature and let it go at that. But I could not work as a mediator if I truly believed that conflict emerges from some dark, inescapable side of the human psyche. To help people solve problems, I must believe in the existence of solvable problems, and, sure enough, that belief has led to the identification and resolution of many conflicts over the years.
But do lessons learned in practice with individuals and small groups apply to conflicts among much larger—and perhaps more resistant—masses of people? Had my colleagues and I learned anything, I wondered, over the years of practice that had theoretical significance on the level of collectivities, and, if so, how could we turn theories into tools for understanding, and perhaps helping to solve, those intractable struggles?
Before I became a mediator in the United States, I lived in India, and there I encountered a dramatic example of community conflict, the longtime struggle between Hindus and Muslims that culminated, in 1947, in the radical reorganization of the subcontinent. I determined to start my project there.
Communalism (as such friction between communities is labeled in South Asia) has been studied and theorized abundantly, for obvious reasons. Ethnic, racial, religious, and other sorts of community conflicts interlace so much of modern history with thick lines of intransigence that their understanding is a high priority for peacemakers and politicians alike. In India, communalism runs like a pulsating vein through the body politic of modern times. Every account from whatever perspective, whether nationalist, colonialist, or popular, must contend with questions of community conflict. Too often such “disturbances” are dismissed as aberrations of human nature. But to do so is to relinquish any possible response beyond brute repression, and that response has again and again proven inadequate. More to the point, tensions between Hindus and Muslims have taken many forms in different places and at different moments, suggesting causes and dynamics that beckon to be understood in specific terms rather than universals.
If we avoid the temptation to lump together every instance of strife between communities inhabiting common borders—those sorts of conflicts called communal, nationalist, ethnic, and so on—then we can begin to ask a set of questions that are otherwise meaningless. What were the motivations of people who at one moment lived peacefully side by side, yet at another came to blows? What was happening to induce animosity, and what happened at the moment of conflict that decided them to mobilize and fight? What events, both in the large frame of their lives as occupants of a land experiencing historic changes and in the small frame of their day-to-day world, combined to inspire their acts of contentiousness? In particular, how did they comprehend and interpret those experiences, and translate them, both as individuals and as communities, into the dramas they enacted?
It is this space between the most private of experiences and the most public of actions that especially interests me in my study of community friction.1 When I consider stories of village communalism, I want to know how people saw their world, how they placed their own desires within it, and how their sense of political possibility was influenced by distant winds of change. It has become common to assert that