Rethinking How We Talk About the History of Bengal's Muslims (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revisited: Partition and the Bengali Muslims of India
The Geopolitics, 2022
It may come as a surprise to many people that Bengali-speaking Muslims form the second largest Muslim ethno-linguistic group in the world after Arab Muslims. The 1947 Partition is remembered largely by the massacres of more than a million people, which took place as Hindu and Muslim mobs clashed during the migration of between fifteen to twenty million people to newly created India and Pakistan. While the scholarship of the event is largely focused on the Punjab region where some of the worst massacres took place, there is a need to produce more scholarship on what other regions experienced. It is important to note that, despite the growth in scholarship about Bengal’s partition in recent years, there remains a particular need to document the Partition experiences of Bengali Muslims of India and conduct archival research in light of the increasing strength of the Indian right-wing, which continues to label this group as “outsiders”. Hence, in this article commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s partition, it will be worthwhile to look at the colonial history concerning the Bengali Muslims in three of the states of India: West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura.
Analysing the experience of diasporic communities has been the focus of extensive research and debate over the past few decades. Ethnic and Racial Studies has played a role in both publishing some of the most important research papers in this field as well as fostering critical debate about conceptual and analytical tools that are used to study this phenomenon. It is in the spirit of this critical engagement that we publish this symposium on Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais’ study of The Bengal Diaspora. It brings together six critical commentaries by Michael Keith, Nasar Meer, Pawan Dhingra, Victoria Redclift and Fatima Rajina, William Gould, and Sean McLaughlin. Each of the commentaries focuses on specific facets of the book and we hope in doing so they provide an insight into the rich and unusual research on which the book draws.
Journal of Migration Affairs, Vol. VI (1-2): 16-20 , 2024
“You are the son of a Muslim; why do you need so much education?” This one-liner in the book Identity of a Muslim Family in Colonial Bengal: Between Memories and History (New York: Peter Lang, 2021) by Mohammad Rashiduzzaman is enough to make one understand the enormity of the rift between Hindus and Muslims in colonial Bengal. As researchers of the Partition and refugee studies of South Asia, we often wonder how the masses began to accept the idea of making separate homelands for the two leading communities of Bengal. Indeed, they participated actively in communal politics at the grassroots level, initiated chiefly by the three major political parties of united Indian territory: the Congress, the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha, the latter two being actively against the centuries-long tradition of communal harmony in the pre-Partition East Bengal society. Interestingly, a study of the trends of Partition historiography reveals a shift, from the late 1970s onwards, in the focus of the research done by historians and social scientists: from the high politics of Partition to the more human side of it. However, the Partition narratives kept revolving only around the Hindu side of the stories. Hindu refugee narratives, therefore, became more prominent in Partition literature and films. The Muslim accounts of experiencing the division remained marginal for many reasons. The key reason was that the creation of Pakistan, a brand new nation-state on the map of South Asia, has always been seen in official accounts as an absolute achievement of Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Muslim League played a prominent role in the division of the country as Jinnah demanded Pakistan, a swapna-bhumi, or ‘promised land, for the Muslims in the Lahore Resolution of 1940. The demand for a separate homeland for Muslims created a grand narrative for Partition that ignored the social history of Muslim Bengalis, especially the mobility, tension and vibration between the communities in the countryside of Bengal. In this sociocultural and political context of colonial Bengal, Rashiduzzaman’s book provides an eye-opening account of both the processes and reasons behind the transformation of East Bengali society from a centre of composite culture to a land of identity politics.
Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter Edited by Bashabi Fraser
2017
This is a review of Bashabi Fraser's edited volume on the partition of Bengal. The review highlights our need to read the partition event as a warning for future and ongoing genocides. The review also shows the superiority of literature over history. And finally it has something to say about translation and separately, on P Lal.
Partition Literature In Bengal
I In the post world-war period, the partition of India is the biggest tragedy of this sub-continent. The partition of a country does not merely mean an extra line to draw on the map or some fences running through paddy fields, it is also a person's partition from his society, culture, family and above all, himself. The partition of India in 1947 was practically an undeclared civil war. The religion based division of the country anticipated many questions like communalism and the rise of religious fundamentalism. The gory event witnessed the three main religious communities of the sub-continent, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs, trying to destroy each other completely. Thousands of innocent people were killed, looted, raped and mutilated. While documenting the partition and the resulting calamity, we face many problems. If one community speaks only about its distress then the story-line automatically raises its finger against the other community and the story becomes one-sided and fragmented. Partition, almost uniquely, is one event in our recent history in which familial recall and its encoding are a significant factor in any general reconstruction of it. The importance of literary, autobiographical , oral, historical and fragmentary material for an understanding of partition has now been hugely acknowledged by historians. While the western front witnessed only the 1947 partition, the eastern front, that is, the partition of Bengal was a two fold affair. First, in 1947, Bengal was divided into east and west Bengal. West Bengal remained as a part of India while East Bengal got included into Pakistan as a Muslim oriented land. Then after years of fighting to make Bengali as the national language, in 1971, east Bengal emerged as an independent country, Bangladesh, the birth of which was based solely on language. Within this 25 years [from 1947 to 1971], the Indian subcontinent has witnessed many political changes such as the partition and the birth of Bangladesh, but these events did not have the expected effect on the Bengali literature as it should have. Where we have a vast and noted literary canon of partition literature on and about the division of Punjab, we can hardly count the texts written on partition and its effects in Bengal. While discussing the lack of proper partition literature in Bengal, we come across some significant issues. On one hand, the partition did not affect the established people of west Bengal much, irrespective of religion. For them, the 'refugees' were just the 'others' and partition was considered solely 'their' problem. On the other hand, the 'others', the uprooted people of east Bengal who lost their everything-family, home, motherland, wanted to forget, to wipe out this haunting memory of partition once and for all.