COMMUNAL VIOLENCE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY COLONIAL BENGAL 23 symbols and rituals such as 'idolatry', the 'cow' and playing music before mosques. Sometimes traditions were invented to reinforce communal solidarity.14 We have to identify popular perceptions of violence and their role in the moral order of the people, the development of new symbols and identities around which these perceptions were organised, and the construction of new cultural forms through which these gained public expression.15 It might perhaps be imperative to comment on the relationship/ difference between ethnicity and communalism. The two terms have been used in various contexts which are not always internally compatible. Ethnicity was originally used as a label for consciously shared racial characteristics. It is, however, nowadays used in contexts broader than just the idea of race to connote the conjunction of similar consciousness, flowing from language, permutations and combinations of common regional and cultural history, multi-class affinities on a broad front, and though, not necessarily so, religio-as. Racialism is bad ethnicity; ethnicity is supposed to be neutral, though one often shades into the other, as Sikh ethnicity in the Punjab or Gorkha ethnicity in Darjeeling. On the other hand, although communalism in its original meaning or etymological sense referred to excesses of sentiment of any feeling—localist; provincialist, tribalist or casteist—the term in the context of the colonial period of Indian history has assumed specific religious connotations in our ideological jargon. Many political scientists are also now arguing that in the background of the strong centralist tendency of the contemporary Indian state and its resulting alienation from individuals with diverse identities, the concept of communalism has today taken new overtones.16 But that is a problematic different from the concern of the present paper which is restricted to the colonial period. The evidence considered in my research suggests a definite shift in the nature of communal violence in Bengal between 1905 and 1947. While riots of the first three decades of the twentieth century demonstrated a complex coexistence of class and communal elements,17 the fusion of communal with nationalist and class modes of consciousness in the 1940s culminated in relatively more organised and overtly communal riots. I propose to substantiate this hypothesis with an overview of major Hindu-Muslim outbreaks in Bengal between 1905 and 1947. Till the beginning of the 1940s whatever might have been the immediate trigger for an outbreak—music before mosques or a firing from a Marwari house or an accidental killing of a Muslim boy—the collective violence, once it spread, came to be directed against symbols of class and colonial exploitation. In this connection the Mymensingh riot of 1906^07 experienced the first major Hindu-Muslim communal rioting. Troubles began on 21 April 1907 when Hindu swadeshi