ulster sectarianism and the lessons of south asian historiography

Ulster Sectarianism and the Lessons of South AsianHistoriography

Sean Farrell*Northern Illinois University

Abstract

In recent years, both Irish historians and literary scholars have paid much greater attention to themany parallels, linkages and disjunctures between Ireland and India. Unfortunately, this work hasfailed to examine the striking parallels between the construction and operation of sectarianism andsectarian violence in nineteenth-century Ulster and communalism and related violence in earlytwentieth-century India. Looking closely at how these issues have been treated in both histo-riographies, I argue that there are striking parallels, as both Irish and Indian ⁄ Pakistani historianshave struggled with the dictates of postcolonial nationalism, moving from reductionist binaryassumptions about the nature of societal division to what I term the ‘consensus of complex avoid-ance.’ Irish historians, however, have much to learn from their South Asian counterparts, whohave moved beyond such sterile consensus in recent years, producing works of great sophisticationand insight. Above all, these scholars have treated communalism as a complex historical subject; acontingent and ever shifting ideology that often overlaps and co-exists with seemingly contra-dictory notions of class and caste. This raises significant questions about the consensus of complexavoidance and the article closes by calling for Irish historians to revisit their assumptions about thestudy of Ulster sectarianism.

The emergence of a significant body of work that examines the complex links betweenIreland and the British Empire has been one of the most welcome trends of recentnineteenth-century Irish historiography. Much of this work has focused on the relation-ships between India and Ireland, with scholars exploring the imperial affinities betweenthe two colonies to sharpen our understanding of a wide array of subjects ranging fromland tenure and nationalism to colonial science and the nature of empire.1 Given theremarkable parallels between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India andIreland, which both featured deepening sectarian division and the outbreak of increasinglylarge scale communal riots, in each case fueled by the growth of organized nationalistmovements, gradual democratization and religious reform under the aegis of British rule,the fact that this new framework has not been extended to the study of Ulster sectarian-ism is somewhat surprising.

For historians interested in nineteenth-century Ireland, however, this is not simply asituation that calls for more comparative research on religion and politics in India and Ire-land. There are also theoretical and methodological insights to be gained. Unlike Irishscholarship, which largely has sidestepped the subject of sectarianism in recent years,2

South Asian scholars, particularly through the medium of Subaltern Studies, have createda large and sophisticated literature on the nature and evolution of communal division inmodern Indian ⁄Pakistani society. A sustained engagement with this more fully developedliterature holds out the potential to provide scholars with more nuanced and flexiblemodels of sectarian division better suited to fit the more complex portraits of nineteenth-century Ireland that have emerged in recent years. This essay aims to close that gap. After

History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1023–1035, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00727.x

ª 2010 The AuthorHistory Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

surveying recent work on Ulster sectarianism for the ways in which it treats the twonations model and constructs what I term a consensus of complex avoidance, I turn tothe historiographical trends and political context that contributed to the emergence of theSubaltern Studies Group. I then consider how subalternist scholarship on the growth ofcow-protection societies and the controversies that resulted from Hindu processionsbefore mosques can yield categorical insights that sharpen our understanding of the com-plex operation of sectarianism in nineteenth-century Ireland. Irish historiography, I con-clude, requires an approach that brings together the complex operations of sectarianism inquotidian experiences with ongoing work on nationalism.

Sectarianism and Irish Historiography: From Two Nations to a Consensus of Complex Avoidance

In a pair of important essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, James S. Donnelly, Jr.called on Irish historians to pay greater attention to the role that sectarianism played inthe tumult of the 1790s.3 If we broaden the period to roughly 1760 to 1900, a briefreview of the past two decades of historical scholarship on the subject reveals somethingof a mixed response. On the one hand, there has been a dramatic expansion of scholar-ship on politics, religion and violence in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland;a body of work that has dramatically improved our understanding of a number of vitalissues intertwined with the study of sectarianism.4 In other ways, however, the past dec-ade has not been a particularly productive one for the study of modern sectarianism.Despite the excellent work outlined above, comparatively few scholars have tackled thecomplex issues involved in the construction of sectarian categories and how these relateto events on the so-called narrow ground.5

The approach that long dominated the historical treatment of sectarianism over the pastcentury has been the so-called two nations model, a notion rooted in the idea that mod-ern Ireland is divided between Irish Catholic and British ⁄ Irish Protestant nations withfundamentally antagonistic interests and goals. Few have articulated this model as clearlyas the late nineteenth-century Ulster newspaper editor Thomas MacKnight: ‘The plain,the undeniable truth is that there are two antagonistic populations, two different nationson Irish soil …. There is no community of feeling, and therefore can be no common cit-izenship between the two sections of the Irish people’.6 In the 1970s, this model wasexemplified by the work of Andrew Boyd and Sybil Baker, whose widely read narrativesfeatured almost primal tales of tribal hatred between lower class men and women boundto flags of Orange and Green.7 More recent work on nineteenth-century Ulster hasemphasized the problems associated with the two nations approach, critiquing its ahistori-cal portraits of essentialist and unchanging enmities between Catholics and Protestants,and in turn constructing much more sophisticated and nuanced portraits of the complextextures of northern experiences. For all of the insights gained, however, I would arguethat even the best of this recent work tends to replicate the essentialist treatments ofsectarianism that have dominated both colonial and nationalist discourse. This tends tooccur not in explicit treatments of sectarianism but in narrative analyses that rely onunexamined assumptions regarding the insufficiency of sectarianism’s binary categories.The effect is, however, much the same; the subject of sectarianism, so often assumed andalways mentioned, is almost never at the center of critical attention.

The dominant approach to sectarianism in contemporary Irish historiography might betermed a consensus of complex avoidance. Kevin Whelan expresses this consensus withcharacteristic panache: ‘Specialists on the period are agreed that a simple Protestant ⁄Catho-lic binary is unable to accommodate the complexities of the Ulster situation or the subtle

1024 Ulster Sectarianism and South Asian Historiography

ª 2010 The Author History Compass 8/9 (2010): 1023–1035, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00727.xHistory Compass ª 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

interfaces between Anglican, Presbyterian, and Catholic, and the resultant patchworkmosaic of religious affiliation throughout Ulster’.8 On one level, it is impossible to disagreewith Whelan’s point, but given the terms of reference, one wonders if there is a singleconceptual framework that can ‘accommodate the complexities of the Ulster situation’. Ofcourse, saying that sectarianism is an insufficient framework for understanding the com-plexity of the Ulster experience does not necessarily preclude its study. But unfortunately,that is precisely what has happened in recent years, as few have interrogated or examinedissues of sectarianism in any depth, instead turning their skills and attention to supposedlymore interesting and complicated subjects. In short, recent scholarship has failed to discussthe obvious question, how does sectarianism fit into the more nuanced understandings ofmodern Ulster society constructed by Irish scholars in recent years? By maintaining thereductionist portrait of sectarianism as a concept that is irreconcilable with the contingentand subtle portraits drawn in recent work by ‘the specialists on the period’, this approachavoids confronting some of the most critical questions about the modern Irish experience.

This approach is evident in one of the finest books on nineteenth-century Ireland ofthe past few years, Kyla Madden’s Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics.9 Of all therecent works in modern Irish historiography, there is no doubt that Madden’s studyspeaks most directly to the complex problems involved in studying Ulster sectarianism.Madden closely examines seven case studies of Catholic–Protestant interaction in ForkhillParish, County Armagh. Ranging widely in topic from rural violence to landholdingpractices and education, each of the chapters challenges analyses that start from sectarianpresumptions, providing more grounded and nuanced portraits of late eighteenth- andearly nineteenth-century South Armagh life. Madden opens the book with a detailedreconstruction of the infamous Forkhill Incident of 1791, a chapter that emblemizes boththe real strengths and weaknesses of the current consensus on northern sectarianism. TheForkhill Incident occurred when a group of Defenders assaulted Alexander Berkley, thelocal schoolmaster, and his family in their home. The attack was a particularly gruesomeaffair; all three members of the household (Berkley, his wife, and brother) had their ton-gues cut out and limbs severed, wounds that led to the death of Berkley’s wife. In thecontentious atmosphere of the 1790s, the attack was immediately categorized as sectarianon the basis that Berkley was an Irish-speaking Protestant, and historians have tended toaccept this explanation. Building her case from a skilled and skeptical reading of availabledocuments, Madden argues that the atrocity had little to do with Berkley’s Protestantism.Rather, it was a product of his active opposition to the Defenders (he had participated inthe prosecution of several local men), a clear violation of their moral economy. Theattack was thus a threatening message to ‘those like him’, a description Madden reads as areference to opponents of the local Defender association rather than Protestants per se.10

It is a powerful and largely convincing argument, and Madden’s emphasis on Berkley’sstatus as an outsider to local community norms is an important insight that helps usrecalibrate our understanding of the Armagh Troubles.

Yet although I am convinced that the binary Catholic–Protestant division is not thefundamental paradigm that helps us understand this episode, I am not persuaded thatBerkley’s Protestantism did not sharpen his status as an unwelcome outsider and antago-nist. If sectarianism’s simplistic categories are not sufficient to explain the incident, theyare in there somewhere and I think one of our real challenges is not to simply discardthe binary but to tease out how sectarian motivations were intermixed with other socialand cultural forces. This sense of sectarianism as a complex historical subject is preciselywhat is missing in the current historiographical consensus. As Alan Ford has argued in animportant essay on sectarianism in early modern Ireland, it is people’s ability both to live

Ulster Sectarianism and South Asian Historiography 1025


together and apart (often simultaneously) that makes sectarianism such a fascinating butdifficult to understand subject. In short, even the best books in recent Irish historiographyfail to take up the challenge of integrating sectarianism into their nuanced portraits ofnineteenth-century Ulster society, instead presenting sectarianism as the polar opposite ofthe complex and contingent; as essentialist, monolithic, and unchanging – something tomove beyond and certainly unworthy of critical examination.11

Responding to Ayodhya: Communalism and South Asian Historiography

As we seek to improve our understanding of the various ways that sectarianism operatedin Irish society, one obvious place to look for help is India. On the one hand, the subjectmatter has obvious parallels – in the years between 1890 and 1947 British-controlledIndia saw a dramatic rise in outbreaks of ritualized violence between increasingly self-identified groups of Hindus and Muslims. Many of these riots were triggered by Hindufestive or devotional processions that were routed by mosques, a spatial provocation thatcertainly recalls the many sectarian riots generated by Orange processions directedthrough similarly contested and sensitive areas in the north of Ireland. Moreover, like Ire-land, the growth of communal violence was tightly related to the rise of increasinglymodern and organized nationalist movements, a fact that underlines the important rela-tionship between deepening politicization and sectarian or communal division. Butdespite these obvious comparisons in the style and prosecution of ritualized violence anddivision, what I am interested in here is the historiography of communalism, for recentyears have seen the emergence of a literature that has much to commend itself to scholarsof the modern Irish experience.

At first glance, there is rich irony in this, since before the early 1980s, the South Asianhistoriography of communalism is marked by the same types of elisions as its Irish coun-terpart, a pattern that underlines a common postcolonial and national need to project aparticular mythic construction of the past. In the Indian case, communalism was some-thing that was best forgotten (particularly after the horrors of Partition in 1947, where anestimated 1 million men, women and children died, an estimated 80 to 100,000 womenwere kidnapped and ⁄or raped and 12 million people were displaced). When it was dis-cussed, communalism was portrayed as an irrational and primal product of British colo-nialism, an unnatural formation produced by British policies of ‘divide and rule’.

Two factors changed this situation. In 1982, under the mentorship of Ranajit Guha, anumber of scholars formed the Subaltern Studies Group, dedicated to recovering an asyet untold South Asian past in which nonelites played an active part. Although studyingcommunalism was not a central part of the group’s project, a number of scholars, particu-larly Gyanendra Pandey in an influential 1983 article on the cow-protection movementin Uttar Pradesh, used the pages of Subaltern Studies to call for a more complex treatmentof this critical subject.12 By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ever-widening number ofincreasingly sophisticated studies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commu-nalism and communal violence made it clear that sectarianism was once again a legitimateand increasingly dynamic subject of historical inquiry.13

A related factor in this process came from the tangible realm of Indian politics, namelythe growth of exclusivist Hindu nationalist politics, institutionally embodied in the forma-tion, and growth of the Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, which moved to the center ofIndian politics to form a national government from 1998 to 2004. At its broadest concep-tion, this variant of Hindu nationalism centers on the notion that the real India is bestexpressed as Hindutva, or Hinduness, an exclusivist notion of nationality that many



scholar ⁄ activists actively worked to counter. For many more secular and liberal-mindedacademics, the dangers of Hindutva were expressed most clearly in the horrific violencethat followed the 1992 destruction of Babri Masjid, a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayod-hya, riots that claimed the lives of nearly 1,800 people in the city of Bombay alone. Tenyears later, the burning of the Godhra train triggered pogroms that killed some 2,000Muslims in Gujarat. Communalism was clearly something worthy of study, if only tochallenge the dangerous tenets of such a bifurcated notion of South Asian history andsociety. In his lively introduction to a recent conference collection devoted to the themeof ‘living together separately’, Asim Roy cites 51 significant books and articles dedicatedto the subject of communalism written in the 1990s alone. Scholars interested in promot-ing the development of a politics of toleration and understanding in South Asia havetaken up the Hindutva challenge.14

There are certainly dangers in this approach. Too often much of this scholarshiphas been ahistorical, ironically replicating the essentialist identities that it was designed tocritique. In the preface to the second edition of his The Construction of Communalism inColonial North India, Gyanendra Pandey reflects on what he terms the ‘crushing present-ism’ of some of this work and calls for more ‘… detailed historical monographs examin-ing inter-communal relations on the ground in different places, among different classes,during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, …’.15 Ideally this passage would serve as amodel for future directions on Irish historical scholarship, for if Pandey’s comments areon the mark for modern Indian historiography, they are doubly so for a field where thesequestions have been comparatively neglected.

Studying Communalism: Some Critical Themes for Irish Scholars

Challenging colonial and nationalist narratives that portray communalism as a static,essentialist, and reactionary mode, a number of recent scholars have argued that commu-nalism is a protean construct that must be examined in its broader historical and socialcontext; an ever-changing and contingent ideology capable of overlapping with seeminglycontradictory forces like class and caste. One of the greatest insights to come from thisliterature has been the notion that communal identities are complex and contingent, ableto shift between, and co-exist with seemingly contradictory forces. In the recent editionof The Construction of Communalism in North India, Gyan Pandey has made this pointwith typical clarity and force: ‘Rather than seeing communalism as a thing-like creature,sharply distinguished from nationalism and other transformative struggles of the colonialperiod, what I had suggested that these were contradictory yet related ways of conceptu-alizing the political world, thinking political futures and fighting for particular politicalarrangements’.16 Or, as Pradip Kumar Datta argues, ‘… the fundamental problem is ourobsession with the singularity of collective identities’. This conception of identities asseparately bounded makes it difficult to understand the dynamic and historical processesof identity formation.17 Although these insights are surely not foreign to students ofmodern British historiography,18 the obvious parallels between Indian communalism andIrish sectarianism make this literature of particular use to historians interested in modernIreland.

The promise of this approach can be seen by looking briefly at recent treatments of twosubjects central to the construction of communalism in early twentieth-century SouthAsia: the creation and growth of cow-protection societies (Gaurakshini Sabhas) across thesubcontinent and the communal controversies and violence tied to Hindu processions per-forming music in the proximity of mosques in Bengal in the 1920s and beyond. At the



turn of the century in north and central India, cow-protection societies proliferated in sta-ted opposition to the Muslim ritual practice of go-korbani, where a cow was slaughtered tomark various religious festivals. These societies grew remarkably quickly in these years andopposition to go-korbani was increasingly at the center of Muslim-Hindu conflict, withdeadly large-scale riots breaking out in 1893 and 1917. Before the early 1980s, when his-torians examined this issue, they tied the riots to elite politics, arguments that in manyways recalled nineteenth-century colonial arguments about the essential fanaticism of themasses. Gyan Pandey and P. K. Datta have challenged this view, instead of showing thatthe riots were shaped by the challenges presented by a quickly changing rural economyand, most importantly, by inter-caste competition triggered by lower caste attempts toimprove their status, particularly the ahir, a lower status caste group associated with cattle-tending and dairying. In both Pandey’s and P. K. Datta’s analyses, these castes’ attempts tomove up the ladder led various caste groups to try to prove their greater purity, whichthey did by emphasizing their opposition to heretical Muslim practices.19 In this viewthen, communal controversy and violence were triggered by a temporary combinationof factors: the socio-economic difficulties faced by small landowners (or zamindars) andby a movement to reform Hindu religious practice, which in part was driven by sec-tional caste efforts to improve their caste status. When the particular conditions forthis alliance between high- and low-caste Hindus dissipated, other types of alliancesemerged, some of them crossing the Hindu–Muslim divide.20

This is not to say that the widespread rioting of 1893 and 1917 did not have a lastingimpact; both the experience and memories of communally identified violence doubtlessmade it easier to organize along communal lines in north and central India. But therewas nothing inevitable or even logical about such sectarian outcomes and many alterna-tive groupings and movements could be and were put together across North India in the1920s and 1930s. Even Suranjan Das, whose work on communal violence in Bengalstresses the deepening impact of sectarian rioting, emphasizes that this processoccurred only in fits and starts.21 Because the factors involved in communal riots varyaccording to time and place, each riot needs to be examined in its own broader historicalcontext, with a firm understanding that riots that appear similar on the surface may bethe products of radically different circumstances. This approach not only emphasizes theidea that communalism is a complex and contingent historical subject, but also bringsgreater attention to the positive elements in the construction of communalism (i.e., thatHindu communal unity in part was produced by an internal competition by caste groupsattempting to out-Hindu one another if you will), that communal identities are rarely asimple product of negative ‘othering’. This work has interesting implications for the studyof nineteenth-century Ulster, which also saw a dramatic growth of religious reformmovements, often featuring public displays and performances that led to some of the larg-est sectarian riots of the era. Evangelical street preaching, which triggered the secondphase of the infamous Belfast riots of 1857 and remained a contentious issue throughoutthe second half of the nineteenth century, might be thought of as a rough parallel toHindu reform movements, as street preachers competed with one another for city audi-ences, ratcheting up sectarian tension in the city through their use of increasingly con-frontational anti-Catholic rhetoric.22 On a broader level, the fact that intercaste orinterdenominational competition helped to generate communal controversy also under-scores the temporary basis of such sectarian alliances, for competition is hardly the moststable of foundations. Given the long lasting (if ever shifting) power of such constructionsin many divided societies around the world, it is remarkable how often the ‘internal’aspects of communal identity formation are overlooked.



If the controversies surrounding the proliferation of cow-protection societies seemrather distant from sectarian clashes on the streets of Victorian Belfast, our second exam-ple of South Asian communalism, the ‘music before mosque’ clashes of 1920s Bengal,seems depressingly familiar. Here controversy centered on the Hindu practice of kirtan, adevotional chant and response that marked both festive and religious processionals.Although contention over the music before mosque issue was nothing new, it became anincreasingly controversial subject from the early 1920s, when Muslim clerics highlightedthe issue as particularly offensive and a number of Hindu societies engaged in civil dis-obedience over the right to March in devotion. Essentially a clash over the control andmeaning of urban space, music before mosque controversies can be analyzed as a kind ofMuslim counterpoint to go-korbani. But as P. K. Datta observes in his sophisticated treat-ment of this issue, there was also much that was new. Because these public controversieswere unattached to any ritual calendar and could thus be applied to everyday interactionin any setting, they served as a portable device for more effective communal mobilizationacross the subcontinent.23

Of course, a narrow focus on the particular issues involved in the music before mosquecontroversies does not explain the extent and destruction of the violence that wrackedCalcutta and other Indian cities in the mid to late 1920s any more than a telescopicexamination of Orange processions and the sectarian riots they often triggered helps usunderstand the broad contours of late nineteenth-century Ulster society and culture. Toget at the forces that led these riots to be what one scholar calls instances of ‘decisive vio-lence’ – violent clashes that moved beyond the local circumstances that birthed them –we should look to broader fields to explain their intensity. For P. K. Datta, these passionsare better explained by the tremendously unstable environment created in the 1920s bythe syncretic implications of the Swaraj ⁄ Khalifat political movement, which seemed tosuggest the emergence of new political identities that transversed religion in South Asia.Reacting against these emergent solidarities, self-labeled religious organizations took tothe streets, identifying themselves as the real Hindus or Muslims, a process that culmi-nated in large-scale communal mobilizations and violence. Religious intermediaries likemullahs or religious reformers became especially critical to this process, again underliningthe dynamic, contingent, and complex process of identity formation. Moreover, P. K.Datta charts the complicated relationship between class and communal mobilization,showing how class can be implicated in communal struggles and communalism can beused to suppress or supercede class.24 It seems to me that this has real implications for thestudy of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ulster, where only Tony Hepburn in hisnuanced analysis of the Belfast Riots of 1935 has shown how class and sectarian identitiescan both co-exist and define one another in stark antagonism.25 To get at these complex-ities, however, we need a totality of explanation; a close and critical examination of ‘thehistorical formation that provides the codes and circuits, in and through which riots andtheir transmission derive their intensity’.26 This can only be attained by examining thebroader historical context on its own terms and charting the often contradictory forcesinvolved in the construction of communal and ⁄or sectarian identities within that context.As the work of Pandey and P. K. Datta makes clear, however, the rewards for suchefforts can be quite rich indeed.

Another critical relationship that recent scholarship on communalism has privileged isthe fraught one between communalism, nationalism and the writing of history. Pandeyhas been particularly insistent on this point. Answering critics who have challenged hisnotion that communalism was a form of colonial knowledge, Pandey argues thatnationalists adopted many of the core ideas of colonial understandings of communalism.



Although Indian nationalists disagreed with the colonial notion that communalism wasa pathological condition of Indian civilization, arguing instead that it was a unnaturaland more recent product of British colonialism, both understood communalism as abackward and primal force, something to be moved away from. If the British sawcommunalism as the degraded equivalent of nationalism in India, Indian nationalistsviewed it as their polar opposite, their unnatural other. Both considered it as a funda-mentally ahistorical, monolithic, and reactionary force.27 Challenging this notion, Pan-dey and others have called for more critical examinations of the relationship betweencommunalism and nationalism. They have been particularly insistent on examining therole played by the writing of history and its relationship to the needs of the nation-state and Indian and to a lesser extent, Pakistani nationalism. This critique centers onthe notion that historians have suppressed the essential roles that communal violenceplayed in the formation of India and Pakistan – as Pandey, Veena Das, and UrvashiButalia have argued, for most people in South Asia, the defining experience of inde-pendence and partition was violence.28 Although Irish scholarship has begun to paymore attention to the ways that history writing lay at the heart of the construction andevolution of various Irish identities, there is still much to be done.29 Initially quiteproductive and interesting, the one sustained dialog on the subject, the scholarly andpopular debate on revisionism generated by Brendan Bradshaw’s 1989 call for historiansto treat nationalist historical narratives with greater empathy, has long since run itscourse and now seems much more concerned with contemporary academic andnational politics than with serious inquiries about historical methodology and the rela-tionships between history writing and nationalism.30 If sectarianism is not simply aproduct of the lack of historical imagination, we desperately need a much more seriousengagement with the construction and evolution of this category and the role that his-torians have played in its controversial histories. For Irish historians, it seems to me thatthis involves asking a series of important questions about sectarianism. Is sectarianism inIreland protean and historically contingent? How do other forms of identity such classor regionalism relate to the construction of sectarianism? What events create a pretextfor sectarian violence and what forms does this violence take? What short-term andlong-term impacts does violence have on identity formation in late nineteenth- andearly twentieth-century Ulster? Finally, how have both individuals and communitiesattempted to craft alternatives to the dominant sectarian narrative? These are not easyquestions, but we need to confront them more directly if we are to understand someof the most critical issues that have shaped the modern Irish experience. Only sustainedhistorical investigation and the creation of detail-laden monographs and case studies thatexplore different aspects of inter-communal relations across time and space can begin toaddress these issues.

Conclusion

In a typically provocative essay, David Miller suggests that the primary issue facing thenext generation of Irish historians will center on whether nationalism or sectarianism willdominate the master narrative of Irish history.31 Although this simplifies what I see as theoften overlapping relationship between these two identity frameworks, it does serve as auseful conceptual map for charting future developments. In short, there seems to be littlethreat to nationalism’s privileged place within Irish historiography. As I have briefly out-lined in this paper, there are very few signs that Irish historians are on the cusp of pro-ducing an array of detailed monographs on Ulster sectarianism akin to the work



associated with Subaltern Studies. Given the central importance that denying sectarianismhas played in the evolution of the island’s respective nationalisms, it is quite understand-able why so many historians have been hesitant to tackle such a fraught subject. More-over, it is not as if the recent consensus of complex avoidance has had particularlydeleterious effects on the profession: I would argue that Irish historians have producedmore sophisticated and nuanced monographs in recent years than in any comparable timeperiod in the twentieth century.

What is needed is not a wholesale change of direction, but a process of augmentationor re-orientation; to re-engage historical scholarship with questions of religious identityand division in light of this new more sophisticated view of the Irish experience. By dis-carding outworn and static notions of communalism and closely re-examining the com-plex of forces at work in its construction, South Asian scholars have dramaticallyimproved our understanding of the Indian past (and present). Scholars interested in theIrish past must do the same. While there will be very real differences, of course, it isworth noting that many of key variables involved in the construction of South Asiancommunalism and Irish sectarianism seem quite similar (religious reform, democratizationand the consequent reordering of space, the transformative impact of ritualized violenceand dramatic economic change). Taking up the challenges involved in studying sectarian-ism is critical, for until we confront the complex operation of sectarianism in modernIrish life, our understanding of that past will be comparatively deprived and I wouldargue that this weakens our ability to confront the very real divisions that continue tooperate in Northern Ireland in particular.

Short Biography

Sean Farrell is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. His firstbook, Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784–1886 (Lex-ington, 2000), won the 2001 Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First Book fromthe American Conference for Irish Studies. He is the author of numerous articles on dif-ferent aspects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and Irish history, and has alsoco-edited two collected volumes of essays: (with Danine Farquharson) Shadows of theGunmen: Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland (Cork, 2007); and (with Michael De Nie)Power and Popular Culture in Modern Ireland: Essays in Honour of James S. Donnelly, Jr.(Dublin, 2010). Currently working on a monograph-length study of evangelical religionand working class formation in early Victorian Belfast, he is also the Vice President of theAmerican Conference for Irish Studies.

Notes

* Correspondence: Department of History, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL 60115, USA. Email: [email protected].

1 For introductions to the general trend, see Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford History of theBritish Empire Companion Series) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Keith Jeffrey, eds., An Irish Empire? Aspectsof Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996); Stephen Howe,Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For work on India andIreland, see S. B. Cook, Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland (NewDelhi; London: Sage Publications, 1993); Tadhg Foley and Maureen O’Connor, eds., Ireland and India: Colonies,Culture and Empire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006), reprint; Joseph Cleary and Michael De Nie, eds., Eire-Ireland, 42 ⁄ 1,2 (Spring and Summer 2007); Joseph Lennon, Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syra-cuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004); Julia M. Wright, Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature



(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Barry Crosbie, ‘Ireland, Colonial Science and the GeographicConstruction of British Rule in India, 1820–1870’, Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 963–87.2 Thankfully, there is evidence that this is changing. For example, see Mark Doyle, Fighting like the Devil for theSake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 2009).3 James S. Donnelly, Jr., ‘Republicanism and Reaction in the 1790s’, Irish Economic and Social History, xi (1984),94–100, ‘Sectarianism in 1798 and in Catholic Nationalist Memory’, in Laurence Geary, ed., Rebellion and Remem-brance in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 15–37.4 The literature touching on sectarianism in the ‘long nineteenth century’ is far too large to summarize here, butkey texts include Allan Blackstock, Loyalism in Ireland (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2007); Sean J. Connolly,Religion, Law and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); 263–313, Louis M. Cullen, The Emergence of Mod-ern Ireland (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981) and ‘Late Eighteenth-Century Politicisation in Ireland’, in Cultureet Pratiques Politiques en France et en Irlande XVIe-XVIIIe Siecle (Paris: Centre de Recherches Historiques, 1990);James S. Donnelly, Jr., Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–24 (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 2009), 119–49; Marianne Elliott, The Catholics of Ulster (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Sean Farrell, Ritualsand Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784–1886 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky,2000); Catherine Hirst, Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002);Kyla Madden, Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics: 1789–1858 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Uni-versity Press, 2007); David W. Miller, ‘The Armagh Troubles’, in Clark and Donnelly, eds., Irish Peasants (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 155–91 and The Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders: Selected Documents on theCounty Armagh Disturbances, 1784–1796 (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1990); James Smyth,The Men of No Property (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992); and Kevin Whelan, ‘Politicisation in County Wexfordand the Origins of the 1798 Rebellion’, in Hugh Gough and David Dickson, ed., Ireland and the French Revolution(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), 156–78.5 See my ‘Writing an Orange Dolly’s Brae’, in Danine Farquharson and Sean Farrell, eds., Shadows of the Gunmen:Violence and Culture in Modern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007), 90–2. For thoughtful reflections on thestudy of sectarianism in Irish historiography, see Alan Ford, ‘Living together, living apart: sectarianism in early mod-ern Ireland’, in Ford and McCafferty, eds., The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2005); Willa Murphy, ‘A Germ in the Blood’, Irish Literary Supplement (Spring 2003), 10–1;and Madden, Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 3–7.6 Quoted in Farrell, Rituals and Riots, 174.7 Sybil E. Baker, ‘Orange and Green: Sectarian Riots in Victorian Belfast’, in Dyos and Woolf, The Victorian City:Images and Realities, 2 (London and Dublin: Routledge, 1973), 787–815; Andrew Boyd, Holy War in Belfast: A His-tory of The Troubles in Ireland (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1969). More sophisticated versions of the unchanging enmitiesmodel can be found in A. T. Q. Stewart, A Narrow Ground (London: Faber and Faber, 1977) and Marcus Tanner,Ireland’s Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation’s Soul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001).8 Kevin Whelan, ‘Introduction to Section III’, in Bartlett, Dickson, Keogh, and Whelan, eds., 1798: A BicentenaryPerspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), 190.9 Madden, Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics. For a similar elision in an otherwise fine book, please see JohnBew, The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).10 Madden, Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics, 27.11 There are some small signs that things are changing. Marianne Elliott has recently published a major work onreligion and identity in Modern Ireland, and Paul Bew’s challenging study of modern Irish politics tackles the highpolitics of sectarianism. See Bew, Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2007); Marianne Elliott, When God Changed Sides: Religion and Identity in Irish History (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2009).12 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, 1888–1917’, in RanajitGuha, ed., Subaltern Studies, Vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 60–129; Pandey, ‘The Prose of Other-ness’, in David Arnold, ed., Subaltern Studies, Vol. 8 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), 188–221. See also Par-tha Chatterjee, ‘Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–35’, in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, Vol. 1(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 9–38.13 Three books from this period stand out as particularly critical: Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communal-ism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Suranjan Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–47 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sandria Frietag, Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and theEmergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).14 For an explicit call to action along these lines, see Mushirul Hasan and Asim Roy, eds., Living Together Sepa-rately: Cultural India in History and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also the various essays inK. N. Pannikar, ed., The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999). On a morecautionary note, a few scholars have discussed how Hindutva supporters have appropriated the Subaltern Studiesemphasis on pre-modern South Asia for their own purposes. See Latha Menon, ‘Coming to Terms with the Past:India’, History Today, 54: 2 (August 2004), 28–30.



15 Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India, xii–xiii.16 Ibid., xi.17 P. K. Datta, Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early 20th Century Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 9. See also Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 25.18 For one particularly prominent example, see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Havenand London: Yale University Press, 1992), 3–5.19 It is worth noting here that there were parallel efforts at Islamic religious reform in this period in Bengal andother areas, led by itinerant mullahs who increasingly stressed the need for religious purity and the cultivation ofseparate cultural identities, which manifested itself in the ‘music before mosque’ controversies discussed below. SeeDas, Communal Riots in Bengal, 23–4; Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengali Muslims, 1871–1906 (Delhi: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1981), particularly chapter three.20 Pandey, ‘Rallying Round the Cow’, 60–129; Datta, Carving Blocs, 239–46.21 See Das, Communal Riots in Bengal, 207–13.22 Janice Holmes, ‘The Role of Open-Air Preaching in the Belfast Riots of 1857’, Proceedings of the Royal IrishAcademy, 102C (2002), 47–66. Also see David Miller’s characteristically provocative, ‘Did Irish Presbyterians have aDevotional Revolution?’ in Murphy, Evangelicals and Catholics in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four CourtsPress, 2005), 38–54.23 Questions of caste and religious reform again were key here, as Datta shows how the offending devotional musicof kirtans was a particularly important component of lower caste Hindu efforts to improve their status. Datta, Carv-ing Blocs, 250–1.24 Datta, Carving Blocs, 250–81.25 A. C. Hepburn, ‘The Impact of Ethnic Violence: the Belfast Riots of 1935’, in Hepburn, A Past Apart: Studiesin the History of Catholic Belfast, 1850–1950 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1996), 174–202.26 Datta, Carving Blocs, 254.27 Pandey, Construction of Communalism in North India, 2–22.28 Pandey, Remembering Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side ofViolence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Veena Das, ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivorsin South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).29 With regard to historical writing and the construction of sectarian identities, see James Kelly’s recent book aboutSir Richard Musgrave: Kelly, Sir Richard Musgrave, 1746–1818: An Ultra Protestant Ideologue (Dublin: Four CourtsPress, 2009). For a critical figure in the construction of collective historical memory, see Raymond Gillespie, ‘Tem-ple’s Fate: reading The Irish Rebellion in late seventeenth-century Ireland’, in Brady and Ohlmeyer, eds., British Inter-ventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 315–33. For a more generalmediation on history, myth and Irish writing, see R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ire-land (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).30 Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 26, 104(November 1989), 329–51. For other important interventions, see R. F. Foster, ‘We are all revisionists now’, TheIrish Review 1 (Autumn 1986), 1–5; Alvin Jackson, ‘Unionist History (i)’, The Irish Review, 7 (Autumn 1989), 58–66; Kevin Whelan, ‘The Revisionist Debate in Ireland’, Boundary 2, 31 ⁄ 1 (2004): 179–205. For more extendedtreatments of these issues, see Ciaran Brady, Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism (Dublin:Irish Academic Press, 1994); and especially D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day, eds., The Making of Modern Irish His-tory: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy (Dublin: Routledge, 1996).31 David W. Miller, ‘John McHale, Henry Cooke and the Curious Demise of the Confessional State in Ireland’, inMichael de Nie and Sean Farrell, eds., Power and Popular Culture in Modern Ireland: Essays in Honour of James S. Don-nelly, Jr. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 109–24.

Bibliography

Ahmed, R., The Bengali Muslims, 1871–1906 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1981).Baker, S. E., ‘Orange and Green: Sectarian Riots in Victorian Belfast’, in H. J. Dyos and M. Woolf (eds.), The

Victorian City: Images and Realities, Vol. 2 (London and Dublin: Routledge and Kegal Paul, 1973), 787–815.Bew, P., Ireland: The Politics of Enmity, 1789–2006 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).Bew, J., The Glory of Being Britons: Civic Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2009).Blackstock, A., Loyalism in Ireland (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2007).Boyce, D. G., and O’Day, A., eds., The Making of Modern Irish History: Revisionism and the Revisionist Controversy

(Dublin: Routledge, 1996).Boyd, A., Holy War in Belfast: A History of the Troubles in Ireland (Tralee: Anvil Books, 1969).Bradshaw, B., ‘Nationalism and Historical Scholarship in Modern Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 26 104 (November

1989): 329–51.Brady, C., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994).Butalia, U., The Other Side of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).



Chatterjee, P., ‘Agrarian Relations and Communalism in Bengal, 1926–35’, in R. Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies,Vol. 1 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 9–38.

Cleary, J., and De Nie, M., eds. Eire-Ireland, 42 ⁄ 1,2 (Spring and Summer 2007).Colley, L., Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).Connolly, S., Religion, Law and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).Cook, S. B., Imperial Affinities: Nineteenth Century Analogies and Exchanges Between India and Ireland (New Delhi;

London: Sage Publications, 1993).Cullen, L. M., The Emergence of Modern Ireland (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1981).Cullen, L. M., ‘Late Eighteenth-Century Politicisation in Ireland’, in L. M. Cullen and L. Bergeron (eds.), Culture

et Pratiques Politiques en France et en Irlande XVIe–XVIIIe Siecle (Paris: Centre de Recherches Historiques, 1990),119–49.

Das, S., Communal Riots in Bengal, 1905–47 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991a).Das, V., ed., Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1991b).Datta, P. K., Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early 20th Century Bengal (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1999).Donnelly, J. S., Jr., ‘Republicanism and Reaction in the 1790s’, Irish Economic and Social History, xi (1984): 94–100.Donnelly, J. S., Jr., ‘Sectarianism in 1798 and in Catholic Nationalist Memory’, in L. Geary (ed.), Rebellion and

Remembrance in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000), 15–37.Donnelly, J. S., Jr., Captain Rock: The Irish Agrarian Rebellion of 1821–24 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,

2009).Doyle, M., Fighting Like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).Elliott, M., The Catholics of Ulster (New York: Basic Books, 2001).Elliott, M., When God Changed Sides: Religion and Identity in Irish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).Farrell, S., Rituals and Riots: Sectarian Violence and Political Culture in Ulster, 1784–1886 (Lexington: The University

Press of Kentucky, 2000).Farrell, S., ‘Writing an Orange Dolly’s Brae’, in D. Farquharson and S. Farrell (eds.), Shadows of the Gunmen: Vio-

lence and Culture in Modern Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2007), 90–2.Foley, T., and O’Connor, M., eds., Ireland and India: Colonies, Culture and Empire (Dublin: Irish Academic Press,

2006), reprint.Ford, A., ‘Living Together, Living Apart: Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland’, in A. Ford and J. McCafferty (eds.),

The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–23.Foster, R. F., ‘We are All Revisionists Now’, The Irish Review, 1 (Autumn 1986): 1–5.Foster, R. F., The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).Frietag, S., Collective Action and Community: Public Arenas and the Emergence of Communalism in North India (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1989).Gillespie, R., ‘Temple’s Fate: Reading The Irish Rebellion in Late Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in C. Brady and

J. H. Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),315–33.

Hasan, M., and Roy, A., eds., Living Together Separately: Cultural India in History and Politics (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2005).

Hepburn, A. C., ‘The Impact of Ethnic Violence: The Belfast Riots of 1935’, in A. C. Hepburn (ed.), A PastApart: Studies in the History of Catholic Belfast, 1850–1950 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1996), 174–202.

Hirst, C., Religion, Politics and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Belfast (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).Howe, S., Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).Jackson, A., ‘Unionist History (i)’, The Irish Review, 7 (Autumn 1989): 58–66.Jeffrey, K., ed., An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester and New York: Manchester

University Press, 1996).Kelly, J., Sir Richard Musgrave, 1746–1818: An Ultra Protestant Ideologue (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2009).Kenny, K., ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series) (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2005)Lennon, J., Irish Orientalism: A Literary and Intellectual History (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2004).Madden, K., Forkhill Protestants and Forkhill Catholics: 1789–1858 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univer-

sity Press, 2007).Menon, L., ‘Coming to Terms With the Past: India’, History Today, 54 ⁄ 8 (August 2004): 28–30.Miller, D. W., ‘The Armagh Troubles’, in S. Clark and J. S. Donnelly, Jr. (eds.), Irish Peasants: Violence and Political

Unrest (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 155–91.Miller, D. W., The Peep O’Day Boys and Defenders: Selected Documents on the County Armagh Disturbances, 1784–

1796 (Belfast: Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, 1990).



Miller, D. W., ‘John McHale, Henry Cooke and the Curious Demise of the Confessional State in Ireland’, in M.De Nie and S. Farrell (eds.), Power and Popular Culture in Modern Ireland: Essays in Honour of James S. Donnelly, Jr.(Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2010), 109–124.

Murphy, W., ‘A Germ in the Blood’, Irish Literary Supplement, 22 ⁄ 2 (Spring 2003): 10–1.Pandey, G., ‘Rallying Round the Cow: Sectarian Strife in the Bhojpuri Region, 1888–1917’, in R. Guha (ed.),

Subaltern Studies, Vol. 2 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 60–129.Pandey, G., The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).Pandey, G., ‘The Prose of Otherness’, in D. Arnold (ed.), Subaltern Studies, Vol. 8 (Delhi: Oxford University Press,

1994), 188–221.Pandey, G., Remembering Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Pannikar, K. N., ed., The Concerned Indian’s Guide to Communalism (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999).Smyth, J., The Men of No Property (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992).Stewart, A. T. Q., A Narrow Ground (London: Faber and Faber, 1977).Tanner, M., Ireland’s Holy Wars: The Struggle for a Nation’s Soul (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

2001).Whelan, K., ‘Politicisation in County Wexford and the Origins of the 1798 Rebellion’, in H. Gough and D. Dick-

son (ed.), Ireland and the French Revolution (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990), 156–78.Whelan, K., ‘Introduction to Section III’, in T. Bartlett, D. Dickson, D. Keogh, and K. Whelan (eds.), 1798:

A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003).Whelan, K., ‘The Revisionist Debate in Ireland’, Boundary 2, 31 ⁄ 1 (2004): 179–205.Wright, J. M., Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2007).

