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OF UNDIVIDED COMMITMENT
A TRIBUTE TO PAPIYA GHOSH (1953 - 2006)
BY KUMKUM SANGARI IN BIBLIO,
JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 2007.
Papiya Ghosh was killed with heinous
brutality on 2 December 2006. Her demise has
left her family, friends and colleagues
grieved, shocked, filled with a sense of
irreparable loss. Papiya Ghosh's
contribution as a historian of Bihar and as
a historian of Indian nationalism and
communalism is yet to be fully recognised,
the more so because of her immense personal
modesty and rectitude. The full import of
her work will unfold in time (two of her
books are still to be published), and here I
only outline the range and uniqueness of her
work.
Papiya's writing has none of the
parochialness associated with regional
history but has the depth, immersion, and
inwardness which characterise the best of
regional historiography. Her work moves both
outwards from and inwards to Bihar: it
uncovers the articulation of nationalist
struggles with the political history of
Bihar as well as the regional recasting of
nationalist politics, Nehruvian notions of
secularism, and ideas of composite culture
in the making of nation, community, quam and
biradari. This history is regional but never
isolated. The region has it own dynamic,
class and caste specificity, and is also
shaped by wider nationalist and communal
configurations. Bihar is seen, as it were,
from both ends as well as from a 'middle
space' composed by the interactions of the
regional and national. Thus the varied
attitudes towards the Muslim League are
examined in the interlock of broad
imperatives, local tensions and the
different class locations of muslims. Her
most recent essay, writing Gngajamni: In the
1940s and After" (published as a tribute to
her in Social Scientist last month) shows
her remarkable ability to canvas broad
political movements and elaborate the
minutaie of local sentiments. She analyses
syncretism/composite culture, as a formation
opposed to Hinduisation and Islamicisation,
in the multiple contexts of its regional and
historical composition, its lived aspects,
as well as its post-Independence trajectory
as an 'idea'. The essay traces the differing
understandings of syncretic/composite
culture in the 1940s in the writing of
Congress figures like Rajendra Prasad and
Syed Mahmud, and Muslim League figures,
especially Badruddin Ahmed, and shows how
these ideas came to be re-nuanced by
Badruddin Ahmed after Partition not only
because he joined the Congress but also to
re-inscribe national belonging.
Papiya's work on the Hindu Mahasabha and the
Muslim League tracks their tendentious use
of women as community signifiers. In the
1920s and '30s, the Hindu Mahasabha's
communal discourse, centred around shuddhi,
specifically targetted Muslim women. This
involved aggressive distortions in its
incendiary publications and the forcible
abduction of low-caste women for 'reconversion'.
Both forms of violence flowed into
pre-Partition violence in the '40s. She also
shows how the Hindu Right's construction of
a 'dangerous' Muslim masculinity varied
according to the class location of Muslims.
Partition as a political event was divisive.
In her teaching and writing, Papiya
emphasised the need to study it in an
'undivided' way, to look at its qualitative
and affective aspects across countries and
continents. She did major work on Partition
and Bihar, Muslims who migrated, those who
became refugees, those who were stranded or
occupied in-between places, the wrenches of
migration and the hardening of ideologies,
and the futures that were sought but never
achieved. She shows how Partition created
fissures in the patriarchal politics of
'community.' Further, her work on Bihari
(Indian and Pakistani) migrants in the UK
and USA connects Partition to the
enlargement of the South Asian diaspora, and
calls into question the very idea of the
nation and belonging after 1947. The field
she shaped thus took in Bihar, India, the
subcontinent and its diaspora.
Several aspects of Papiya's work engage with
Gender and Cultural Studies. Among these are
the centrality of representation as a
material force in the historical dialectic:
the way representations of women,
masculinity, Muslims and low-castes textured
or even structured political movements; the
way stereotypes of the disprivileged were
made and their significance in assembling a
history from 'below'. Her intense interest
in archived and orally circulating notions
of the past goes beyond the closures of
conventional periodisation (she often asked
if modern Indian history stopped at 1947),
and sees them as a palpable force in the
lives of contemporary Backward and Dalit
Muslims as well as Bihari diaspora. She set
out to understand the embodied relationships
of class, caste, religion, gender and
reconfigured patriarchies, and in the past
few years had begun to work on the
circulation of Popular Culture such as Sufi
compositions, Bhojpuri cinema and songs. Her
work incorporates Gender and Cultural
Studies but not in a superficial way. Her
scholarship partakes of a profound inter-disciplinarity
but remains based on meticulous archival
research and sensitively interpreted
interviews. It is the work of a historian
with a vision accompanied with immense
integrity, rigour, a grasp of complex social
processes, an incisive insight and political
commitment.
One of Papiya's most important contributions
was the nurturing of young historians
(students, younger friends) both inside and
outside the classroom. The generosity of her
giving, the gifts of personal friendship,
and a rich corpus of work are what she has
left us with.
Papiya Ghosh did her Ph.D. from Delhi
University on the civil disobedience
movement in Bihar. She was Professor of
History at Patna University and held several
distinguished fellowships. She was ICCHR
fellow at the Centre for Contemporary
Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
New Delhi; fellow, Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, Shimla; Rockefeller fellow,
Institute of South Asian Culture, University
of Chicago; fellow, Institute of Triangle
South Asian Consortium, North Carolina State
University; Visiting Professor, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. She was also
Advisor to the Asian Development Research
Institute, Patna. She had published widely
in anthologies and journals including Indian
Economic and Social History Review, Indian
Historical Review, Journal of Historical
Studies, Social Scientist and Refugee Watch.
Her most recent publication is Partition and
South Asian Diaspora: extending the
subcontinent (New Delhi: Taylor and Francis,
2006).
The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences
has started the Papiya Ghosh Memorial Fund
(donations can be sent to R-l
Baishabghat-Patuli Township,
Kolkata-700094). Several other institutions
are planning activities and awards to honour
Papiya Ghosh and keep her memory alive: the
school, college and university in Patna
where she had taught; Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library, Delhi; and Oxford University,
UK.
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