Debt and Muslim self-making in late-colonial Bengal

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the ways in which indebtedness, which plagued the peasantry in the early twentieth century colonial Bengal intensified debates that raged in the Bengali-Muslim public sphere about the status of the prohibition on riba (a Quranic prohibition on usurious transactions). In investigating these debates and its actors, I explore the manner in which discussions about circumventing debt-induced hardships, as they came to be anchored in the thorny issue of the prohibition on riba, got entangled in the problem of defining moral visions of the Muslim self and community and revealed conflicting notions of Muslim improvement and reform between more elite social and religious reformers and their rural co-religionists. Within a rural discourse of Muslim ‘self-improvement’, the process of interpreting the riba prohibition would successfully establish the immorality of interest on loans as a form of earning made without the expenditure of labour. This linking of the prohibition on riba (variously interpreted as interest, usury or excess) with the expenditure of labour (or its lack thereof) was a novel spin on earlier theological positions on the issue, which would inform modes of peasant radicalism as well as a nascent leftist city-based Muslim intelligentsia’s justification for socialism as the antidote to economic ills.