Rhetoric and ritual in colonial India: the shaping of a public culture in Surat City, 1852-1928

Abstract

Reviews of Books royal family and his activities in the Free Thai Move- ment should have strengthened his political position. Yet after the country returns to normal, Pibul comes out on top, and Pridi loses (again). Why? Chronology alone cannot explain or even clarify the issues that make the 1930s and 1940s such a critical turning point in modern Thai history. CONSTANCE M. WILSON Northern Illinois University SYED NESAR AHMAD. Origins of Muslim Consciousness In India: A World System Perspective. Foreword by IMMAN- UEL WALLERSTEIN. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 29.) New York: Greenwood. 1991. Pp. xv, 311. $47.95. Syed Nesar Ahmad's work is one of synthesis and analysis, reviewing a wide range of secondary works to explain Muslim consciousness, conceptualized as a separate Muslim political consciousness. The book proceeds chronologically, with chapters on nine- teenth-century Islamic revival movements in re- sponse to British rule; the rise of modernism in the context of the great depression of the late nine- teenth century; the rise and decline of Hindu-Muslim unity through the course of World War I and into the 1920s; and, in a long final chapter, Muslim separat- ism during the Depression of the 1930s and World War II. Ahmad's approach has two valuable charac- teristics: first, to show identities as historically consti- tuted in interaction with social, economic, and politi- cal contexts; and second, to show the critical importance of placing those contexts in a larger geographical setting than the boundaries of the na- tion-states that so often define our histories. The motor to political action and indeed Muslim consciousness in Ahmad's analysis is elite material interests. Recalling studies by scholars like Paul Brass (for example, his Language, Religion and Politics in North India (1974]), Ahmad emphasizes competition among elites who then, as political grids change, deploy cultural symbols in order to mobilize the popular support needed to participate in those grids. Ahmad links class developments to broad patterns of economic change to show that, far from any single communal interest, it is the interests of powerful groups, interests potentially at odds with those of co-religionists, that are at stake. Thus, the jotedars of Bengal emerge as a powerful class of small landlords whose interests diverge from the powerful, largely Hindu, big landowners as well as from the Muslim lower peasantry who are, ultimately, persuaded to support them nonetheless on grounds of shared religion. While suggestive of significant developments, Ah- mad's analysis will seem to many readers too singular, particularly because of his neglect of the wholly new context of a public culture, created by new modalities AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW of communication, that transforms identities and public action. As Immanuel Wallerstein notes in his foreword (p. ix), If one composed two lists of world- wide names of ... 'groups,' one list say as of 1500 and one say as of 1950, some on the two lists ... would be the same nominally. But would they be the same existentially, or sociologically? Ahmad offers an im- plicit description of the contrast signaled in Waller- stein's statement, but one would wish for a richer sense of the transition. For that, the approaches of social and cultural history would come into play as they do not here and would be seen as integral to, not separate from, the economic and political structures emphasized throughout. Hindu and ' Muslim sol- idarities-let alone those denoted fundamentalist, orthodox,'' and heterodox -are often treated here as historically continuous categories and not as groupings that are in the process of construction. The topic of this book, the creation of politicized ethnicity and community in the twentieth century, could not be more timely given today's world events. Ahmad was a young scholar tragically killed in an airplane hijacking in 1986. In this posthumously published work, he has raised important questions, and, in his emphasis on economic differentiation and competition, he has left us a significant legacy for further research. BARBARA D. METCALF University of California, Davis Dou GLAS E. HA YNES. Rhetoric and Ritual in Cownial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852-1928. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1991. Pp. xi, 363. $49.95. Douglas E. Haynes has written a thoughtful book about ideology and nationalism in colonial India. He starts with the founding of Surat municipality in western India in 1852. His interest initially was polit- ical history; that this history was written in language familiar to him struck him as strange. He conceptu- alizes his task as explaining the development of political ideology along liberal democratic lines, look- ing at symbolic behavior-rhetoric and ritual-to show that Surat's public culture, while constrained by its development under colonial rule, was formulated by the elite through struggle and interaction with colonial officials and institutions. Haynes sees himself as an ethnohistorian, inter- ested in the construction of cultural meaning, and he puzzles over why the leaders of India's independence movement used the language of liberal, representa- tive democracy when that language ill-served the interests of the underclasses. In his conclusion, his concern with contemporary India is clear. He sug- gests that the most important test of democracies that have grown out of colonial contexts rather than out of demands from deeper within society is whether FEBRUARY 1993