Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992

By Shahid Amin

Book Overview

Taking Gandhi's statements about civil disobedience to heart, in February 1922 residents from the villages around the north Indian market town of Chauri Chaura attacked the local police station, burned it to the ground and murdered twenty-three constables. Appalled that his teachings were turned to violent ends, Gandhi called off his Noncooperation Movement and fasted to bring the people back to nonviolence. In the meantime, the British government denied that the riot reflected Indian resistance to its rule and tried the rioters as common criminals. These events have taken on great symbolic importance among Indians, both in the immediate region and nationally. Amin examines the event itself, but also, more significantly, he explores the ways it has been remembered, interpreted, and used as a metaphor for the Indian struggle for independence. The author, who was born fifteen miles from Chauri Chaura, brings to his study an empathetic knowledge of the region and a keen ear for the nuances of the culture and language of its people. In an ingenious negotiation between written and oral evidence, he combines brilliant archival work in the judicial records of the period with field interviews with local informants. In telling this intricate story of local memory and the making of official histories, Amin probes the silences and ambivalences that contribute to a nation's narrative. He extends his boundaries well beyond Chauri Chaura itself to explore the complex relationship between peasant politics and nationalist discourse and the interplay between memory and history.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520087801
• ISBN13: 9780520087804
• Release Date: October 1995
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 210 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

From Event to Metaphor

Shahid Amin discusses the ways in which colonialist and nationalist discourses have been appropriating the incident of Chauri Chaura that took place in the early twentieth century in Northern India. The incident occurred when an angry mob, volunteers for Gandhi's stayagarha movement, burned the police station killing twenty-three policemen. The defiance of the non-violent philosophy naturally turned Gandhi against the perpetrators, after which they were outcast by nationalists and labeled as criminals. This then released the peasants from the sanctions of the political into a regime of criminality thus freeing their bodies from any nationalist connotations. However, after the partition, the post nationalists' state exonerated the same peasants, hailing them as freedom fighters and commemorating the incident as a significant event in the colonial struggle. Thus, Amin revisits the incident through archival and ethnographic research to identify hitherto unheard voices and to demonstrate the significance of decoding and encoding the Chauri Chaura into meaningful complexes of nationalist and postnationalist discourses. "The meaning of Chauri Chaura lies in its ephemeral and metaphoric positioning within the colonial and the national archive." Interestingly, as a historian Amin does not seems infatuated in unearthing the source that led to the incident, which then transformed the event into a metaphor, deployed frequently to any violent event across India. There was no center that provoked the angry peasants. In fact, he was interested in the way local people remember and memorize the event in stories. He outlined a detailed ethnography of people's everyday lives, lives that do not necessarily intersect with nationalist ideology. For instance, the geographical particularities of each village in itself and in relation to other villages, economic structures that underlie the functioning of the peasant population such as various occupational groups, cultural modalities associated with beliefs and values, etc. An important aspect of Amin's thought is his representation of the peasants' interpersonal relationships in the villages by paying careful attention to the nuance and subtleties that usually escape scholar's analysis. For instance, he highlights the kinship pattern of individuals involved in the incident to suggest living and emotional relationships suppressed under the blanket term of mob. Perhaps, Amin suggests one cannot reduce these diverse practices and spaces to a single category of anti-colonial resistance. Nonetheless, his long familiarity with the region allows him a greater access to information that made possible tracing of familial networks along with a social-political milieu of the community. Amin's work suggests the contested nature of the idea of nation. The ways in which Chauri Chaura deploys the tropes of nation and nationalism depend on a spatial-temporal category. For instance, the Chauri Chaura, as an actual event in 1922, fr