Some of the nostalgia for jute, at least implicitly, is a critique of the garments industry: Tariq Omar Ali

Tariq Omar Ali's 'A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta' published by Princeton University Press (2018) explores how global capitalism shaped peasant life and society in the Bengal Delta during the late 19th and early 20th century. 

In a 2022 interview with the New York Times, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen described the book as: 'seriously unknown, but a wonderfully interesting book — and a very easy read — written by a hugely talented young Bangladeshi writer named Tariq Omar Ali.' 

In an exclusive interview with The Business Standard, the author – currently an Associate Professor at Georgetown University – spoke about why he decided to explore this subject, the challenges in undertaking the research, the implications of his findings and the resonance it has with present-day Bangladesh.

Tell us a bit about what inspired you to research this subject, and that too from this perspective.                          

I was inspired by a talk by a historian of slavery in the US South, Walter Johnson. I was a second-year PhD student, and I was struggling to find a dissertation topic when I heard Professor Johnson give a talk on global cotton prices and the lives of enslaved people in the American South. 

He spoke about how the violence visited on slave bodies in the American South was linked to cotton prices in Liverpool. He spoke about the plantation as a visual field of power, with an overseer looking over a field of white cotton bolls turning brown, and about how slaves ran away through the swamp, where the overseer's sight did not extend. 

Essentially, he related the social, ecological, and political histories of slavery in the American South – its most sensory and bodily details – to the global cotton market and cotton prices in Liverpool.

I was blown away by this ability to see the economy not as a set of boring and dry equations, but as sensory, bodily, felt history. And I thought about how can I pursue this line of thinking in my chosen region, today's Bangladesh. 

Naturally, I thought about jute as the counterpart to cotton in the American South, as the commodity that linked everyday life and global capitalism. 

I began the project with a very vague idea. I was going to study how jute shaped everyday life in Bangladesh's jute-growing regions. 

The book that ultimately took shape resulted from research and reading, documents in archives and the works of other scholars who shaped the way I thought about archival documents. 

How difficult was it to research this book?

It wasn't too difficult, as almost all the records I accessed were kept in well-organised archives. 

My research took me to Dundee, Scotland, the site of the earliest jute mills, and to London, Kolkata, Delhi, and, of course, home, to Dhaka. I have mostly used the records of the British Raj, which are well-kept and organised in multiple places. 

I also used pamphlets and poems published in small towns like Mymensingh, Cumilla, Faridpur etc, during the 1920s and 1930s. These publications are available at the Dhaka University Library, at the National Library of India in Kolkata, and through the Vernacular Tracts Collection at the British Library. 

I want to especially mention our national archives, here in Agargaon. It is an amazing space to work and they have an extensive collection of official documents from the colonial and Pakistan years.

Let's get into the content of the book. To start with, how did jute cultivation impact the politics of the Bengal delta (you describe in the book how the fate of the Krishak Praja Party was intertwined with jute)? Would you say it contributed to state formation (you mention the Bengal famine's role in the creation of Pakistan; the creation of mofussils, etc)?

The book makes two arguments about how the tremendous rise of jute cultivation during the 19^th century transformed this region. 

First, it entangled jute cultivators in a global marketplace, making their lives and livelihoods dependent upon the global terms of exchange between jute and consumer goods. 

Second, it transformed the built landscapes of the delta, especially with the extension of railways and coal-powered steamers to transport ever-increasing quantities of jute. 

The important space in this new landscape, I argue, was the mofussil railway and river market towns where huge quantities of jute were being bought and sold – places like Narayanganj, Sirajganj, Chandpur, Akhaura, Rangpur, etc. 

These towns grew rapidly along with the jute trade. These fundamental changes in everyday life in East Bengal's jute tracts would, of course, shape politics.

Let me address the example of the Krishak Praja Party you mention. The book argues that the Krishak Praja Party emerged during the 1930s as a mofussil-based challenge to the two Calcutta-centric political parties that had dominated politics in colonial Bengal, the Congress and the Muslim League. 

The book argues that the KPP's nucleus was formed from a new community of mofussil Bengali Muslim middle-class with origins in the countryside that emerged during the 1920s, as some peasant families invested jute earnings in pursuing non-agricultural professions and trades. 

Further, the KPP's emergence coincided with the deep impoverishment of jute cultivators, caused by the global depression and the collapse in global jute prices. The KPP's manifesto for 1937 was a peasant populist programme to restore jute cultivators' prosperity, not just through the abolishment of zamindari but also through market controls and ecological restoration. 

The KPP's surprise victory in the 1937 elections was the triumph of the mofussil over the metropolis. 

How did jute cultivation impact religion and the patterns of life?

Let me address "patterns of life" first, as my book argues that the way people thought about Islam changed as lives and livelihoods changed. That is, religious ideas and practices had to be made relevant to the material conditions of life. 

Jute cultivators' increasing market dependence I argue shaped new ideas of what it meant to be a good Muslim in terms of moral and ethical marketplace practices. 

I examine a large number of poems and pamphlets published in mofussil towns during the 1920s and 1930s, by members of the new mofussil Muslim intelligentsia. These tracts promoted hard work, austerity, savvy market operations and the accumulation of wealth as Islamic virtues whose proper practice would ensure salvation in this world and the next. 

There are echoes of the present day in many of the historical events you describe in the book, for eg, price fluctuations impacting the lives of farmers, the machinations of the jute cartel, the nexus between politics and business, the contempt for the police during the non-cooperation movement in 1922. Were you aware of these parallels when you wrote the book?

I like to think of these parallels as continuities between the colonial and the postcolonial. The transformations wrought by jute in Bengal endure, even though jute itself has faded in significance. 

Life in Bangladesh continues to be shaped by the global marketplace that formed around jute, which is felt not only in the prices farmers receive for their commodities but also in the wages that garments or overseas migrant workers receive and the prices that consumers pay for everyday necessities. 

In the book, I write about the disastrous consequences of the political power of big business during the 1943/44 famine, when the cartel of jute mill owners forcibly suppressed the prices the farmer received for jute, even as the price of rice and other necessities of life rose sharply. 

Today's capitalists are not foreign imperialists and they have moved on to other industries from jute. In other words, the existence of seeming parallels between the colonial and postcolonial period points to the fact that decolonisation and independence, in 1947 and 1971, whatever their other effects, did not produce a revolutionary change in the relationship between state, society and market. 

How did jute cultivation impact the relationship between Muslims and Colonial rulers, vis-a-vis the relationship between the Hindus and Colonials?

I do not have a clearcut answer to this very important question. The rise of jute cultivation was definitely accompanied by increasing episodes of violence between Muslims and Hindus in the jute tracts. 

I argue that the support for Pakistan amongst Bengal's Muslims also needs to be understood through jute. Can we, thus, trace a causal link between fibre and communal violence? I think the way to conceptualise this may be through the theory of racial capitalism.

Colonial capitalist relations in British India and elsewhere racialised to legitimise relations of dominance and extraction. The three "races" constituted by the jute trade were, it could be argued, the Bengali Muslim farmer, racialised as physically powerful but intellectually and socially backward; the Bengali or Marwari Hindu middleman, racialised as physically effete but clever and wily, with an inherent tendency to lie and cheat; and the white, British capitalist – the jute mill-owner or exporter – the only race endowed with the mental and physical capacities to organise modern industrial production or participate in international trade and finance. 

Since economic relations were racialised in these terms, economic conflicts were often expressed in the language of religious conflict. Or, phrased differently, economic or political contests between farmers and traders, or villagers and townsmen, took the form of communal conflict between Hindus and Muslims.

Why is there still a national fascination with the revival of jute?

I was surprised by this fascination. So much of the rhetoric of our two independence movements – 1947 and 1971 – have characterised jute as a means of colonial exploitation. There is a long tradition of nationalist literature asking farmers to produce rice for their communities instead of jute for capitalist profits. 

I think some of the nostalgia for jute is, implicitly at least, a critique of the current garments industry. The discourse of jute as an indigenous product of our soil serves as a critique of the flexible supply chains of the garments industry, where Bangladesh's only contribution is the under-valued labour of its garment workers. 

Jute nostalgia also occasionally focuses on the image of a prosperous jute-cultivating peasant household or a unionised male industrial worker in a large industrial enterprise, which is I think an implicit critique of the feminised workforce of the RMG sector or the uncertainties and risks of migrant workers. 

Our nostalgia for jute, I think, is a desire for something other than the neoliberal world of casualised workforces, flexible supply chains and just-in-time production that we inhabit.

What are your thoughts on the parallels between how the RMG export industry changed the patterns of life in Bangladesh?

There is something broadly similar. A single product which can be produced here more cheaply than most other places in the world utterly transforms lives and landscapes. 

The differences are as important as the parallels. While I relate the rise of jute to the growth of the mofussil, the rise of the RMG sector has seen a new kind of built landscape – the factories, worker housing, shopping malls, and infrastructure that has sprung up north of Dhaka. 

There is much more to research and explore on similarities and differences in the transformations wrought by jute and RMG on patterns of consumption, practices of domesticity and sociality, ideas of religion, ethics, and morality, and forms of political engagement and action. 

Instead of nostalgising on our jute pasts, we should probably focus on our RMG present.