Interrogating Political Economy: Islam, Interest, and Labor in Colonial Bengal

This paper examines ways in which the problem of indebtedness, which plagued the peasantry in early 20^th century colonial Bengal became inextricably linked to debates that raged among the Bengali Muslims about the status of the riba prohibition (a Koranic injunction forbidding the giving and taking of interests on loans). In investigating these debates on the religious standing of interest-generating credit transactions, its actors, and their stakes, my paper evinces the manner in which distinctively modern assumptions about labor as the source of value – that lie at the heart of Political Economy – took root among the Bengali Muslim peasantry in and through a contested process of interpreting the riba prohibition, which would eventually establish the dubiousness of interest as a form of earning made without the expenditure of labor. I argue that this linking of riba (variously interpreted as interest, usury, or excess) with the expenditure of labor (or its lack thereof) in popular Muslim consciousness in the early 20th century was a novel spin on earlier theological positions on the issue, and one that would have important ramifications for peasant politics and the trajectory of Bengali Muslim politics more generally.