Disimagined Community: A Muslim Family in Swadeshi Bengal, 1905–11

Against the powerful wave of the Swadeshi movement, the first serious phase of Indian nationalism in Bengal, Muslims of the region forwarded a different tide of community formation based around a new model of Muslim family that operated both in practice and as metaphor. Under the rival watchword of Swajati – “one’s own community” – Bengal Muslims rejected anticolonial bids to boycott British goods in favor of an identity grounded on new values of Islamic comportment, class, and colonial loyalism. Spearheading this turn towards the forging of a novel community was a Muslim zamindari or landed family: the Nawabs of Dacca. This paper reflects on the roots and ramifications of this family’s investments in Muslim mass mobilization at the height of the Swadeshi movement between 1905 and 1911. It asks how the model of patriarchal leadership by an elite, landed family found purchase in Muslim Bengal while the social agitations of Swadeshi activists failed to carry the day.

I argue that the Nawabi clan’s self-styling as a Muslim landed family of “aristocratic” (ashraf) distinction resonated with co-religionists from smallholding and peasant “lower classes” (atrap) in ways that exceeded nationalist calls to critique an extractive colonial economy. Among a recently prosperous and aspirational peasantry, the Nawabs’ model of power based on established hierarchies and family prestige furthered a paternalistic “liberal despotism” that became the signature ideology of the turn-of-the-century colonial state, the so-called ma-bap or “mother-father” Raj. Yet the resulting transformations, which touched ideas of the Muslim family as much as they did politics at the levels of Muslim community and colonial state, in the end reflected less an emergent form of communal nationalism pitched at a perceived “Hindu” Swadeshi, than an attempt to acquire distance from – and thereby disimagine – old but enduring norms of religious belonging in Bengal.