Adventures in Methodology
To learn something of life on the level of internal experience (internal both to the individual and to the community), I determined to study cases of communalism through face-to-face encounters with participants. For my study I chose a northeastern area of the South Asian subcontinent called Bengal, specifically, the portion that is modern-day Bangladesh. (I'll say more later about how and why I happened to choose that precise spot.)
Hindu-Muslim “communal disturbances” (an expression that illustrates the inimitable British knack for understatement) first became noteworthy elsewhere in India during the nineteenth century, but they came later to Bengal, starting in 1907 and spreading throughout the century.2 All these incidents involved hostilities between peoples of the two communities, but there were actually very important differences among them. Some sprang from political disagreements, others from economic protest or neighborly disputes, still others from a host of creative causes. All drew in some fashion on people's identities as Muslims or Hindus, yet most were sparked by some clearly defined problem to which religion was not intrinsic.
The mystery that engaged me was why these struggles became defined as communal. Recent discussions have historicized the very definitions of communalism, calling attention to the role of British colonialists in conceptualizing and imposing a monolithic definition upon very complex happenings.3 Was that label indeed an imposition by outsiders? If the concept of communalism was a construct of the British policy of divide and rule, why, I wondered, did it work? Why did the people involved allow their troubles to be divisively defined in terms of Hindus and Muslims, considering the multiplicity of issues involved? Or did they? Were all these struggles about so many different things formulated by the fighters themselves as hostilities between the communities, and, if so, how did that come to be?
Having selected an area of study, I searched the archival record to catalog instances described as communal.4 From that list I selected six localities: three appeared frequently in the historical record as sites of contention (Kishoreganj, Gopalganj, and Jamalpur), and three were noteworthy for the absence of mention (Faridpur, Madaripur, and Sariatpur), because I thought it was as important to know why communities remained peaceful as why they came to blows.
I went next to visit those locations and began interviewing people, starting with the elderly, moving on to conversations with the young about the stories they had heard, asking people about relations between the communities in their towns and villages. Very soon it became apparent that I had made a mistake; I had assumed those localities not identified as contentious in official reports had been peaceful. While interviewing, I came by chance upon an event totally absent from any written record I had found: a riot in an out-of-the-way place. It had been blacked out of the press and recorded, if at all, only in governmental files currently inaccessible.5 I was thus offered the serendipitous opportunity to construct a history of an event solely from firsthand accounts. Although I went on to interview people in each of my selected sites, this riot became the focus of my study. The lack of a paper trail, which might have been a serious handicap, was in fact a blessing, for I was thoroughly constrained to do what my theory dictated: to build a history out of the subjective versions of those who participated in it.
Why was that a useful thing to do? After all, subjective accounts are just that: piecemeal approaches to a shared reality. Some thinkers argue that you cannot know “what really happened” by listening to the distorted memories of the players, many of whom in any case are now dead or dwelling in the hazy mists of old age. Instead, you must employ more objective reflections of events—documents or indices of material consequence.
It is true that the stories I heard in that Bangladeshi village were not about “what happened” (itself a questionable concept). What I heard was how people saw what happened, or, rather, how people remembered what they saw, or, rather, how they talked about what they remembered, or, rather, how they talked to me about what they remembered—or, rather, what I heard people say to me about what they remembered.
I was well aware that what I learned from my informants engaged my own history at every step of the process and was transformed in that interaction. “There is a relation between angles and attitudes. Where I look from is tied up with how I see.”6 Perhaps those angles are a problem. We could talk about them in terms of distortions and biases and blind spots. But we can equally embrace them as the point of the exercise. After a lifetime of engagement with other people's stories, with a strong sense of gratitude for the ways I have been shaped by those I supposedly influenced, I have come to suspect that all human understanding takes the form of conversation. I have a hard time believing in the myth of the lone thinker receiving enlightenment in grand isolation.
In this view, the “problems” of memory distortion, selective telling, and biased hearing become sources of understanding. What sticks in people's memories, what they choose to say and when they choose to remain silent, how they distort what they know to be their experience, and, overarching all, what I notice and what I overlook are all intensely informative. The selection of truths-to-tell constitutes a story within a story, or, more accurately, the context for the story itself.7 By looking at forms of discourse as well as content, we can learn much about individuals' relationships to institutions, about their experience of economic and political changes, about conflicts of tradition they are experiencing as social transformation takes place, for all these dynamics interweave in the manner of expression characterizing a story.
True, we cannot learn everything. Not every question is best answered by an oral-history approach. If you want to know what social and economic conditions are associated with protest and rebellion, for instance, you might well compare examples from varied places and moments in history rather than listening to the stories of ordinary folk.8 But the questions that most interest me—why people live harmoniously together at one time and at another do not, or, more fundamentally, how people decide to form groups and act to change their world-can be well illuminated by asking the players. If the realm of inquiry is, as I've said, the intersection between individual and collective experience, then the perceptions of the individuals who compose that collectivity are very important.
The division between structural forces and psychological ones is, to me, a false one. How are we to comprehend a Bangladeshi farmer's understanding of his times if we do not hear his story in the context of a material, structural reality? No individual's psychology is divorced from the real conditions of her life, and those conditions are historical. Whereas a developmental Freudian view contends that individual psychology is formed in early childhood, I believe that people are responsive to change throughout life—not, to be sure, in some simple and linear way, but richly, complexly, informatively. Material conditions are inherent in every formulation of personal conflict, in ordinary people's grievances and quarrels and decisions to protest or to stay quiet. To lend a keen ear to the specifics of each incident of community conflict, then, leads us back to the general, but in another way and on another level. We cannot generalize reasons for each individual's actions, but by studying a given individual's personal story we can understand generalized relationships between individual and society, between personal decisions and public forces. Those abstract relationships are useful, not to explain why people have done what they did, but to raise a different set of questions. Rather than asking, for instance, what lapse of controls allowed aggression to emerge? we are led to ask, what goals did these people formulate at that historic moment, in response to what external events, and how did they come to mold