Just one question came to my mind while scrolling down social media posts on the violence in Haryana’s Nuh district triggered by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad-Bajrang Dal procession on Monday: For how many more decades will these people use the same tactics ad nauseam – playing music before mosques and in predominantly Muslim localities?
The question cropped up because of the long history of the issue. It is close to 150 years since music in front of mosques became a source of conflict between Hindus and Muslims.
Researchers have established that music emerged as a recurring source of communal violence during the colonial period, especially in the 1860s. Although their numbers were minuscule when compared to today’s figures, newspaper readers from the last decades of the 19h century were conversant about the phenomenon of ‘music-before-mosque riots’.
Julian Lynch – musician, composer, ethnomusicologist, researchers, and music teacher all rolled into one – wrote that this category of riots, was the result of “deliberate display of a musical procession, usually accompanying a Hindu festival, in front of a Muslim place of worship, causing offence and, very often, violence.”
He would know this issue very well having completed a PhD thesis from the Department of Anthropology with focus on Ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020. He spent well over a decade researching the subject.
Social media posts on the violence in Nuh underscored that the acts of provocation were justified by asserting that Hinduism calls for music being performed on virtually every occasion.
While dwelling on this cause of conflict between Hindus and Muslims, Mahatma Gandhi observed: “Not a single Hindu religious ceremony can be performed without the accompaniment of music.”
In the immediate context, neither the VHP-Bajrang Dal’s insistence to take out a Shobha Yatra on the occasion of Sawan Somvar (Monday in the Hindu month of Sawan) nor the Ram Navami processions earlier in April – which triggered communal violence in seven states during the Ramzan – were religious ceremonies per se.
Instead, music on such occasions is used to display Hindu might. It is a vehicle to establish what Lynch calls, the community’s “domination and territoriality”.
Also read: Riots and Wrong: Communal Violence Raises Electoral Stakes but Who Gains From Polarisation
The message to Muslims when passing through Muslim ilaaqe or localities, what academic Nazima Parveen detailed in her in-depth book, Contested Homelands: Politics of Space and Identity, is that of majoritarian hegemony.
Music played by Hindus in processions, like in Nuh, is not a mark of devotion. Instead, the objective is to convey Hindu power to march-in, at will, into Muslim-dominated localities and play music outside mosques only to slight them. This is done with full knowledge that Islam considers music as morally improper and thereby proscribes its performance.
The intention was to provoke and cock a snook at Muslims in the late nineteenth century. It remains the same even now.
In his thesis and a short paper that preceded it, Lynch drew attention to an 1882 report from Salem in Tamil Nadu by an anonymous correspondent of The Pioneer. The reporter visited the city after a violent series of riots triggered by music played by those in the procession as they passed by the mosque.
The newspaper article mentioned bodies of infants, men and women – all Muslim, strewn in the locality. Their houses and the mosque were burning or “razed to the ground… There were corpses on all sides”. The unnamed reporter also saw “dead pigs thrown in with the corpses of Muhammadan children.”
These stray incidents became part of the emerging Hindu nationalistic toolkit in the 1890s with Bal Gangadhar Tilak consciously converting Ganesh Chaturthi from being “a devotional festival celebrated in honour of the god Ganesh… to a public spectacle with strong political motivations.” This happened in 1894, a year after the 1893 Bombay riots.
These riots between Hindus and Muslims were triggered in August that year when “Hindu ritual music” was played while Muslims offered the Friday afternoon namaz. Lynch wrote that this incident “prompted particularly fervent editorializing from the Marathi-language newspaper, Kesari, especially from the publication’s founder, Brahmin leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak.”
In less than two months, Tilak and other Brahmin leaders of the Bombay Presidency began planning the “grand reinvention” of Ganesh Chaturthi.
In 1894, when the festival was first celebrated as planned, it effectively converted a modest private observance and localised collective immersions into a very public and more extravagant ‘event’. The celebrations have become more ostentatious with time as new features got added.
Until 1893, Hindus and Muslims used to celebrate festivals with one another. Hindus joined the Muharram festivities and contributed money to local groups besides offering their services as musicians for which they were paid. Tilak called for the boycott of Muharram by Hindus.
Lynch wrote: “The anti-Muslim undercurrents of the public Ganesh Chaturthi found more overt expression in Tilak’s calls in 1894 for Hindus to boycott celebrations of Muharram.”
He also cited an 1895 government report that stated that there had been “more Hindu than Muhammadan Tabuts, and on the last day (the day of immersion) by far the greater part of the procession was entirely Hindu”.
Tilak’s anger was because Muslims had forgotten their “ long-standing friendship” and “began a regular campaign of harassing Hindu religious mendicants.”
The colonial regime got the opportunity they sought to divide the people and tighten their grip. The Public and Judicial Department felt that the 1894 Ganpati festival would serve “as a counter blast to the Muharram.”
Lynch was of the opinion that a “crucial aspect of Tilak’s marketing of Ganeshotsav as a replacement for Muharram involved the design of key elements in the festival to directly mimic those of Muharram.” This included music and dancing.
The methods succeeded and like the Ganesh Chaturthi, the Durga Puja in Bengal also was converted from being a mainly a domestic affair to public pujas in community places.
Riots between Hindus and Muslims became a recurring phenomenon and this faultline became visible in Nagpur too, the eventual seat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
In 1923, its eventual founder, Keshav Baliram Hedgewar declared his intention to breach a 1914 agreement of not playing music in front of mosques during the Ganesh immersion procession at the end of the festival.
For him, the right to play music was not a trivial matter but a manifestation of ‘Hindu strength’. When the local administration clamped an embargo on playing music, Hedgewar convinced local Hindu leaders to postpone the immersion of Ganesh idols that year.
The decision and an effort to play music in front of mosques was prevented by the administration which led to a protest. In the annals of the RSS, this agitation is called the Dindi Satyagraha, referring to a group, or dindi, singing songs – ostensibly devotional but acting to create confrontation.
Reports mention that B.S. Moonje was the satyagraha’s chief planner and Hedgewar was the “stormtrooper.” More than half a decade later, Moonje would visit Italy, meet Benito Mussolini and visit numerous fascist training centres. On his return he spoke about replicating several facilities he saw in Italy.
These communal clashes continued in Nagpur and in September 1925, Hedgewar established the RSS. In many ways, ‘music-before-mosque’ was one of the primary reasons that eventually led to the formation of the RSS.
In time, the music-before-mosque changed, like in 1989 in Bhagalpur, slogans were shouted in front of a mosque during that year’s Shila Yatra when specially consecrated bricks were transported to Ayodhya.
This led to one of the worst communal riots engulfing almost the entire district. Several dossiers can be compiled of instances when the Sangh parivar organisations forced communal violence with the same tactics.
And now, as the events in Nuh show, the nearly 150-year-old ploy is still being used.
Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay’s latest book is The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India. His other books include The RSS: Icons of the Indian Right and Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times. He tweets at @NilanjanUdwin
