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THE BOOK REPORT

Between the two partitions of Bengal
In my book, Identity of a Muslim Family in Colonial Bengal: Between Memories and History (Peter Lang, NYC, 2021), I focus on the era of pre-Partition Bengal, trekking through old family recollections, oral anecdotes, memoirs, and other available books and documents on pre-independence India, and blend them with the larger history of British Bengal. Working on my earlier book, The Central Legislature in British India, 1921-47: Parliamentary Experiences under the Raj (Peter Lang, 2019) had taken me back to the undivided subcontinent’s history, which I had researched as a PhD student in England in the early 1960s. Over the years, I reassessed aspects of my old findings and added fresh resonance to the narrative. The recently released Identity of a Muslim Family is largely built around parallel memories and Muslim identity imaginations in Colonial Bengal, wracked as it was by religious, social, and political turmoil between its 1905 and 1947 divisions. It explores, therefore, the real-life experience of Bengal between the two World Wars, and even more importantly, this trajectory aims at Bangladesh’s amnesia about its inheritances from the yore.
By the time the concept of Pakistan as an independent Muslim state seriously hit the South Asian consciousness in the 1940s, Muslim politicians were at the cusp of two seismic prospects—they could either have an independent India under the Congress Party leadership, in a likely coalition with the Muslim League and other parties, or a partitioned India with Pakistan as a separate Muslim state, which would divide both Bengal and Punjab. But there was indeed a last minute, now in oblivion, alternative to the division of Bengal floated by an alliance of Sarat Bose, Abul Hashem, HS Suhrawardy, and Kiran Sankar Roy, well-known actors of Bengal politics.
Two recent commentaries by Shyamali Ghosh and Sana Aiyar wondered if Fazlul Huq’s controversial coalition (1940-43) with Shyama Prashad Mukherjee of the Hindu Mahasabha was a shaky venture for an undivided Bengal through a Hindu-Muslim power sharing. My father remembered that even some of the ardent supporters of Huq did not like that unnerving collaboration. One of the key reasons of such negativity was the Hindu Mahasabha’s deep unpopularity with Bengali Muslims.
Nonetheless, Fazlul Huq’s Krishak Proja Party’s (KPP) main electoral hold was in the Muslim majority districts in East Bengal—he was politically and personally more active in Dhaka than in Kolkata since the 1905 Bengal division. And he was married to a scion of a khandani family in Dhaka. He was proud of his Muslim heritage and he made no secrets about it; visiting ancestral burial grounds of the Muslim constituents was among his campaign postures, my father mentioned.
Why, then, did Huq’s “alternative of 1940-43” not gain political traction? How did the Bose-Hashem-Suhrawardy-Roy backed “third way” for united Bengal collapse? In his autobiography, Nirad C Chaudhuri did not hide his discontent for the British-introduced parliamentary institutions that had challenged the Hindu bhadralok ’s eminence in Bengal. The same sentiments were echoed in the memoir of politician and activist, Abul Mansur Ahmed. Fascinatingly, Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman (Cambridge, 1985) asserts that Jinnah finally accepted the 1947 Partition when negotiations for the anticipated post-independence federal and provincial configurations disappointingly collapsed.
As I discuss in Identity of a Muslim Family , my father the late M Badruzzaman, an inquisitive schoolteacher and essayist, with predilections for history and Sufism, periodically alleged that most well-known Bengali writers did not tolerably project Muslim experiences in their genre. He regretted that Muslims were the shadowy “others” in most notable works of fiction. Such “literary disenfranchisement” spurred Bengali Muslims towards identity politics.
Several autobiographies from the 1920s also confirmed how both Hindus and Muslims tended to help their own kind more often. Influential zamindar-politicians like Nawab Salimullah of Dhaka, Nawab Ali Chaudhuri, and Nawab Shamsul Huda had earlier helped numerous Muslim young men with jobs and encouraged education among Muslims. Fazlul Huq also looked after Muslim educational interests, and individually, he helped countless young men and women gain employment. So while the Muslims usually approached the Nawabs or senior Muslim politicians and officials for government jobs, Hindus usually contacted their Hindu patrons for such favours.
What my research into such grassroots vibrations, oral recounts, legislative scholarship, and recollections of colonial Bengal have revealed is that Muslim politics in British India and pre-partition Bengal had multiple layers—religion was not its exclusive raison d’etre.
An extended version of this article will be available online.
M Rashiduzzaman, PhD is Professor Emeritus in Political Science at Rowan University, New Jersey, USA and author of several books, scholarly essays and articles on British India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
ILLUSTRATION: Mehrul Bari
The book is built around parallel memories and Muslim identity imaginations in colonial Bengal, wracked as it was by religious, social, and political turmoil between its 1905 and 1947 divisions.
M Rashiduzzaman