Darzis (Muslim tailors) and their use of ‘mythic resources’ to stay on in post-partition Calcutta

Abstract

This paper brings into focus the varied nature of South Asian Islam, and how it is bound up with economic and community identities, and their survival strategies in fraught circumstances. In particular, the paper examines the interconnections between Islam, artisan labour, and immobility in the context of Calcutta’s Muslim darzis [tailors]. In doing so, it provides preliminary answers to why some Muslim groups, darzis in the main, chose to remain in particular areas within the city and its borderlands after India’s partition, despite communal intimidation and violence. I argue that darzis used their ‘immobility capital’, a combination of assets embedded in place, to make a success of staying on in Calcutta and its environs after partition. I examine one such asset in this paper: locational incentives and ‘mythic resources’. This paper is divided into two parts. In the first half of the paper, I foreground the locational incentives that drew Muslim tailoring groups to Calcutta between 1911 and 1941: ‘upcountry’ Urdu-speaking tailors from the United Provinces and Bihar, and ‘do-bashi’ (bilingual) Bengali Muslim tailors from the eastern tracts of Bengal. These groups took advantage of the colonial infrastructure to access patrons and informal markets associated with Muslim saints and reformers in the region. The erosion of royal patronage and increasing competition from other social groups meant that tailors had to build up their own craft authority by turning to religious discourses about Islam and artisanship.
In the second half of the paper, I examine the nexus between the economic and skill-based competition of these two groups, and their assertions of competing Islamic identities. Both groups sought to acquire, transmit, and preserve their skills within competing Islamic frameworks anchored in different ‘mythic resources’ embedded in place. While Urdu speaking tailors used vernacular manuals to exert skill-based authority over the trade, strengthening solidarities within their own biradari (caste group); Bengali Muslim tailors asserted their distinctive craft authority through do-bashi ‘improvement’ texts, printed and circulated under the tutelage of ‘Bengali Muslim’ self-proclaimed pirs (saints), well-versed in both Arabic and Bengali. The bilingual nature of these texts represented a cross-fertilisation of Bengali with an Arab/Prophetic model of Islam (not the Persianate Mughal past) to invoke a different model of authority. In doing so, they posed a formidable challenge to the dominance of Urdu-speaking tailors in the trade, and their North Indian ashraf reformist activities – for instance, denouncing saint veneration. If Bengali Muslim tailors had reformist pirs as their patrons, then the Urdu-speaking Awadhi tailors in Calcutta plugged themselves into a different kind of patronage network associated with the legacy of the last exiled Shia king of Oudh, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah in Metiabruz. In the contest for establishing artisan authority, different tailoring groups used competing and often overlapping narratives to underline their own version of Islam, and its relationship to artistry, technical acumen, and regional craft histories. They drew upon different kinds of ‘mythic resources’ and patrons, using languages rooted in the region, to remain competitive. In both cases, Urdu-speaking Muslims and Bengali-Muslim tailoring groups, used the locational embeddedness of their skills in particular nodes of patronage and religious markets, to make a success of staying on in Calcutta and its neighbouring districts after India’s partition.