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Bengal, in the perspective of Curzon and others like him, was the weakest link in the British Indian empire. "A force already powerful, and I certain to be a source of increased concern in the future," they said of the Bengalis. To deal with the growing nationalist threat in eastern India, Cyrzon and his advisers looked for appropriate solutions, which they eventually found in the partition of Bengali-speaking people. "Bengal united is a power, Bengal divided will tug in various different directions," the official assessment stated. Curzon I and Company were dead set on "splitting apart and weakening a substantial group of opponents" to British control. The division operations, or the plan for carrying out the dictum "divide and rule," had to be carried out in such a way that the Bengalis suffered both bodily and mental division. This was what Curzon hoped to do by instilling mutual suspicion and rivalry amongst Bengal's two largest communities, Hindus and Muslims. Curzon and his advisers were well aware that his opponents in Bengal were mostly Hindus, who had profited more than their Muslim counterparts from British rule in terms of socioeconomic and educational opportunities. The majority of Muslims, who are farmers, were unable to take advantage of the same opportunity. Curzon planned to take away from Bengal those temtories where Muslims were more numerous, and join them with Assam to form a new province with Dacca as its capital, by shrewdly suggesting that his Government B wished to stand by the Muslims in their race for advancement with the Hindus, and secure them from any threat of Hindu domination. Dacca, he said, would "acquire the unique character of a Provincial Capital where Mohammedan interests will be significantly represented, if not dominating." To counterbalance the Hindus, they planned to construct a Muslim-majority province out of Bengal (where 15 million Muslims would reside alongside 12 million Hindus, reducing Bengali speakers). Above all, this nefarious game was being undertaken to damage educated Indian middle-class nationalists.

1. The aim of this thesis is to trace the historical and genealogical roots of the Hindu Muslim identity divide.

2. To find out the extent to which ethnic characteristics like language, religion and caste of a nation are responsible for the Hindu-Muslim divide.

3. To judge the extent to which the mistreatment of the Muslim peasantry by the Hindu landlord class influenced the partition of Bengal.

4. To determine why the Bengali Hindu Muslims were later divided on the basis of religious superiority despite their respect for each other's religious festivals.

A thrice-partitioned history:

Since the turn of the century, Bengali Muslims have experienced three divisions. Not all of them have been equally traumatic, but each has served to show the evolving definitions of interests that lead to divisions, as well as the altering concepts of identity and difference that they convey. The Bengali Muslim experience also shows that mobilising identification as a foundation for community may be just as violent, deadly, and ultimately lethal as establishing difference as a foundation for separation.

Under British administration, the first partition of Bengal occurred in 1905, resulting in the merging of East Bengal and Assam into a separate Muslim-dominated province. The colonial authorities defended it on the basis of administrative convenience as well as the independent interests of Bengal's Muslims and Hindus, but it has also been regarded as another example of British divide-and-rule methods in India. It was opposed by a group of high-caste Bengali Hindus, whose landed interests in East Bengal were directly harmed by the partition, as well as notable Muslims, who responded to calls for unity based on a shared Bengali language, literature, history, culture, and way of life. In 1911, it was declared null and void.

The second partition occurred in 1947, when India became independent from British rule and was separated into two halves. Pakistan was established as a homeland for Muslims on the Indian subcontinent. East Pakistan, which included Muslim-dominated East Bengal, was divided from West Pakistan, which included Baluchistan, Sind, the North-West Frontier Province, and Muslim-dominated West Punjab, by almost 1,000 miles of hostile Indian territory. As a result, what is commonly referred to as the 1947 Partition was actually two different partitions: the partition of Punjab and the partition of Bengal.

Within a short amount of time after the partition of Punjab, significant migrations of Hindus and Sikhs into India and Muslims into the new state of Pakistan occurred. The trainloads of the dead that journeyed in both directions, migrants killed as they made their way to a shelter on the 'right' side of the Punjab border, are one of the most enduring and evocative icons of the 1947 Partition. All movement appeared to grind to a halt for the next half century after this single convulsive moment of exchange, as the Punjabs' borders were firmly locked off.

As Joya Chatterjee has pointed out, the Bengal split of 1947 was both unique and viewed as such by Indian authorities. The biggest communal massacres in Bengal occurred the year before, but Division did not result in the cataclysmic violence, rapes, abductions, forced conversions, or trainloads of dead that have been described in accounts of the Punjab partition. In 1947, there were no huge migrations across the Bengal border, and no forced conversions. The Bengali Hindus who did migrate to India, both in 1947 and since then, were not seen by Indian authorities as fleeing the same levels of religious intolerance in Muslim Bengal as those from Muslim Punjab, and hence were not treated as Partition casualties in the same way. Although policed on both sides, the partitioned Bengal borders have remained more or less open since Partition. Between 1956 and 1965, I passed through them every year on my way to and from boarding school in an Indian hill region.

Whatever the veracity of the two partitions, the disparities between Muslim Punjab and Muslim Bengal injected a profound cultural split into the character of a newly formed state that was already physically divided. West Pakistan had expelled its religious minority in a single convulsive moment in 1947, and was now virtually entirely Muslim. In East Pakistan, on the other hand, a sizable minority of Bengali Hindus lived and continued to live — roughly 15% of the population — and there appeared to be a great deal of overlap between Bengali Hindu and Muslim cultures, raising doubts about the authenticity of Bengali Islam among West Pakistanis. Pakistan had to explain its existence in terms of its separate Muslim identity as a nation that had come into being as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, and hence had to purge itself of any Hinduized remants from its past. With Punjabis increasingly dominating the new state's governmental apparatus, it became evident that their brand of Islam, and hence their vision of Pakistan, would come to prevail. The first indication of this was the early attempt to make Urdu, a widely spoken language in West Pakistan, the official language of the new state, and, when that failed, the introduction of the Urdu script for Bengali. The defence of Bengali became a rallying point for Bengali nationalist sentiment: East Pakistan had an active Language Movement within a year of partition and, within five years, its first martyrs when police opened fire on students demonstrating in defence of their language.

The Muslim League, which had campaigned for Pakistan before Partition, was soundly beaten in East Pakistan in 1954, and the party never returned. The Bengali Muslim Awami League won the elections, dropping the word "Muslim" and became the voice of the disgruntled Bengali middle class. In 1956, the four provinces of West Pakistan were reorganised as 'One Unit' and given parity of electoral representation with East Pakistan to ensure that the Bengali people could not acquire a political majority in government by virtue of its numerical majority in the country. Along with the creation of indirect forms of electoral representation to keep Bengalis out of political power, fiscal and monetary measures were implemented to shift East Pakistan's economic surplus to West Pakistan's industrialization.

Although East Pakistan won the language issue, the drive by central government in the western wing to forge a national identity as different as possible from its past continued. A Bureau for National Reconstruction was set up to purge the Bengali language of Sanskrit (read Hindu) elements and to purify it with apparently more authentically Islamic words from Arabic, Persian and Urdu. The songs of Tagore, much loved by Muslim and Hindu Bengalis alike, were banned from state-controlled radio and television, restrictions imposed on the dissemination of Bengali literature and grants offered to artists and literati who were prepared to work for 'national integration'. A policy of assimilation-through-miscegenation was adopted in the 1960s in the system of incentives offered to inter-wing marriages.

In the face of this depiction of their 'Bengaliness' as somehow not quite Islamic enough, Bengalis began to assert their cultural differences from West Pakistan, a process which led to the politicisation of normally uncontroversial aspects of everyday middle-class life. The right to sing the songs of Tagore, to wear the saree and the bindi (the red mark on the forehead indicating a married woman) customary among Bengali women, the more relaxed attitude to the idea of the daughters of the middle classes singing and performing in public, all activities which had once appeared commonplace, became acts of dissent in a context in which they were regarded as evidence of the 'Hindu aberrations' of Bengalis.

In fact, the dress and deportment of Bengali women took on increasing symbolic value in the struggle to assert cultural difference. One of the most powerfully remembered images in Bangladesh today of its struggle for national autonomy is that of the thousands of women wearing the yellow sarees with red borders associated with celebration, wearing bindis and singing songs of Bengali nationalism — including the banned songs of Tagore — who were in the vanguard of the massive demonstrations which began to take place in Dhaka in the final years of East Pakistan.

The break-up of Pakistan is easy for later generations of Bengalis to understand, but not why the country ever existed in the form it did. Was it a breathtaking leap of the imagination, or a devastating failure, to believe that that two peoples, separated from each other literally by over 1,000 miles of enemy territory and symbolically by culture, language, history, apparel, diet, calendar and even by standard time, could ever constitute a single nation simply on the grounds that they shared a common religion? The policy of attempting to redefine one wing in the image of the other was one way to bridge this divide but it was doomed to failure. When the 'One Unit' federation of West Pakistan was finally dismantled in 1970 and direct elections held, it looked like the inevitable fears of the ruling elite were about to come true. As they did when the Awami League swept most of the seats in East Pakistan and won an overall majority in the country.

 But the inevitable was not allowed to happen. Instead, in March 1971, the Pakistan army moved into East Pakistan and unleashed nine months of genocide and rape on its people in the apparent belief that this would rid them of their nationalist aspirations. We are, of course, more aware now how often rape is used as a weapon of war. Some feminists see it as the logical expression of men's inherent violence towards women. Some scholars see it as an attempt by one group of men to dishonour another group of men by highlighting their failure to protect their women. The Pakistan army brought a unique additional element of 'holy war' to its acts of rape against over 30,000 Bengali women: it saw it as part of its mission to populate the region with 'pure' Muslims. The terrible inner logic which had driven the earlier policy of assimilation by-miscegenation was laid bare by the war. A third partition, this time of Pakistan, was inevitable and Bangladesh declared its independence, choosing as its national anthem a much loved song by Tagore, 'Sonar Bangle?.

The truncated Pakistan that remains continued to struggle with notions of identity as other cultural aspirations that had been suppressed in its struggle to dominate its eastern wing came to the fore. Aside from the older struggles of the different provinces in the face of Punjabi hegemony, new divisions have arisen. One such is with the Mohajirs, those who migrated, mainly in 1947, from all over the subcontinent as refugees to Pakistan, and who eventually began to coalesce around their own political interests within the country. Anwar Iqbal, a journalist whose family had migrated from India first to East Pakistan in 1947 and then to West Pakistan in 1970 as a gulf began to open up between the Bengali and non-Bengali population, writes about the confusing politics of what it means to be a Pakistani today: 'Although dozens of ethnic and racial groups live in Karachi, the main division is between them and us. The definition oithem and us varies from group to group. If you are a Mohajir, a Muslim immigrant from India, for you all non-Mohajirs are them. If you are old Pakistanis, then the Mohajirs are them. But sometimes even that is not clear. One group of Mohajir can become the real us and another the real them for each other, depending on their party loyalties. Similarly, the older Pakistanis can divide themselves into various ethnic groups such as the Punjabis, the Sindhis, the Pashtoon and the Baluch and treat each other as them

A drive towards further Islamisation has been the most striking feature of post-1971 Pakistan. A variety of new religious ordinances were brought in, many of which discriminated explicitly against women and minorities. The Ahmediya minority was constitutionally declared non-Muslim in 1974 and a number of religious ordinances, drawn from the sharia, over-ride rights given to women under civil law. Today, with increasing violence between Shia and Sunni Muslims, Pakistan is distinguished as the only place in the subcontinent where Muslims kill Muslims, even within the sanctuary of the mosque, because they are Muslims or, more accurately, because they are the wrong sort of Muslims.

For Bangladesh itself, the main problems since 1971 have related to economic hardship and political stability; poverty and the defence of democracy. However, questions of identity appear sporadically on the political agenda, if only because successive military rulers turned politicians have resorted periodically to Islam and to appeals to anti-Indian sentiment to shore up their political support. Indeed, it seems to be indelibly imprinted in the imagination of this breed of rulers that to be Muslim necessarily means to be anti-Indian, and often, by extension, pro-Pakistani.

At the same time, however, Bangladesh has managed to avoid declaring itself an Islamic Republic and enshrining sharia law in its legal system. Consequently, the rights of women and of minorities have been safeguarded and, while there are episodic and often terrible violations of both, they are not sanctioned by the state; and the state can, and has been mobilised to deal with them. Family courts have been set up all over the country to ensure that women have quicker recourse to justice than would be the case if they were required to go through the main legal system. Women are emerging from the home to take up factory work in cities, sometimes out of poverty and sometimes in search of economic independence. Bangladesh's Grameen Bank has innovated the practice of lending without collateral to the assetless, particularly women, and has been emulated as a model for the reduction of poverty in countries of the North as well as the South. Primary and secondary schooling have been free for girls since 1992, something which may explain a remarkable closing of the gender gap in education. Finally, not only has the country had two women prime ministers in quick succession but the present one appears to be performing the extraordinary feat of being simultaneously pro-Indian and pro-Pakistani.

Partitions force nations to rewrite their history in order to bring their historical narratives into line with their current perceptions. Many Pakistanis would rather forget about their past by erasing all memories of the events of 1971, which undercut the basic basis on which Pakistan was founded: to provide a safe haven for the subcontinent's Muslims. Many of those who do recall the founding of Bangladesh choose to remember it as a result of Indian intrigues to dismember and weaken its old foe, Pakistan. However, the violent politics of identity will continue to tear Pakistan apart as long as new generations of Pakistanis accept this selective reading of their history rather than seeking to learn from it. They must recall that, far from being 'not good enough' Pakistanis, Bengali Muslims were at the vanguard of the country's independence movement. The Muslim League was founded in East Bengal in 1906, with Bengali Muslims playing a dominant role; it was Bengali Muslims who gave the Muslim League its first and only electoral victory in the provincial elections of 1937, and its first opportunity to form a Cabinet; the Muslim League won again in Bengal in 1946; and a Bengali Muslim, one of the leading members of the Muslim League, moved the 1940 Lahore resolution, which called for the establishment of Pakistan.

It's also critical that they recall West Pakistan's role in the events that led to Bangladesh's formation. In 1971, India may have had its own motives for supporting the national autonomy ambitions of Bengali Muslims, but those aspirations were sparked by Pakistan's prejudiced, bungling, and, in the end, murderous elites.

The Instrumentalising of Religious Identities in Bengal:

First of all, one must differentiate between Bengali Muslim identity and the Muslim identity of the western provinces of India. In the latter, many Muslims can claim Persian ancestry, whilst in the former, as Sumit Sarkar (1973) evidences, many Bengali Muslims were of low-caste Hindu origin, Buddhists or simply people who had never been fully assimilated into the structure of Aryan society and thus were attracted to Islam’s message of egalitarianism (346). Despite having converted to Islam, these new Muslims displayed large degrees of syncretism, a perception Sarkar verifies through his reading of the 1909 Imperial Gazetter which evidences how lower-class Muslims joined in the Durga Puja and other Hindu festivals, while Muslims also consulted Hindu almanacs and worshiped Sitala and Manasa. This syncretism worked both ways as Hindu peasants (and sometimes even zamindars) offered their respects to Muslim pirs. Historical evidence of syncretist cults such as Satyapir also exists where the Sufi tradition supplied an intellectual sanction to these “eclectic admixtures” (Sarkar 347).

The aforementioned thus evidences how one cannot view the category of Hindu and Muslim as being incommensurable and, as Rakesh Batabyal (2005) indicates, communalism was moreover “a product of the modern age, which unleashed these historical forces in the colonized countries” (21). To gain a deeper understanding into the birth of communalism and its supplementary discourse, the perceived “Hindu/Muslim divide”, one must look at Lord Curzon’s 1905 division of Bengal, a division aimed at weakening the Indian nationalist movement. This lasted until 1911 when Bengal was reunified due to a united front against it; proof that a common Bengali identity had prevailed over communalism. Therefore, interpreting communalism as something essential within the Indian “character” denies, “the existence of a colonial context, and of the historical experience of a substantial section of humanity as colonial subjects” (Batabyal 24). When the colonial state negotiated between different communities so as to safeguard its own interests, what it was effectively doing was to give new political meaning to the concept of what it meant to be Hindu or Muslim and this, ultimately, created new antagonisms that previously did not exist. Therefore, one must look deeper into the affirmation that conflicting religious identities were the root cause of Partition and that violence was a natural expression of these incommensurable positions. While we cannot deny that socio-cultural differences did exist and that certain antagonisms came about as a result of these differences, these came into sharp focus at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Sarkar assures that the administrative arguments in favour of this partition were a “deep imperialist design of ‘divide and rule’”, and this is a view that is endorsed by the majority of Indian scholars writing on the subject (11). In his speech in Dacca (18 February, 1904) Curzon assured that this partition would, “invest the Mohammedans in Eastern Bengal with a unity which they have not enjoyed since the days of the old Mussulman Viceroys and kings” (quoted in Sarkar 1973: 16), and for this reason a large section of the Muslim gentry supported partition due to the devolved powers it afforded them. Although the Swadeshi movement (1903- 1908) was a heterogeneous movement that encompassed “a common culture at the village level based upon an amalgam of Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim and primitive folk elements”, it was, moreover, the initiative of a Hindu elite that saw partition as a clear affront to its hegemony (Sarkar 1973: 19). So, although many Muslims were involved in the movement, the Muslim intelligentsia felt more comfortable with securing its own hegemony in East Bengal.

The second and final Partition of Bengal came about precisely because of a breakdown of mutual trust between Hindus and Muslims. Bidyut Chakrabarty (2004) assures that, “Capitalising on the disproportionate development between the two communities, the Muslim political forces strengthened their claims for a separate state”, and the Hindu elite, seeing that its own influence was becoming eroded, gave no real opposition to this idea (36). In Bengal, nine-tenths of zamindaris were held by Hindus, while the landless peasants were mostly Muslims. Furthermore, the bhadralok (Hindu elite in Bengal) had performed a more successful assimilation to the colonial culture when compared to their Muslim counterparts who fell behind in education and had lost political leverage as a result. The rise of communalism can thus be viewed as a Muslim middle-class struggle that was provoked by the imbalances created within a colonial/capitalistic system. Having lost faith in colonial politics due to the aforementioned lack of assimilation, Muslims turned to communalism as a means of garnering power (Batabyal 24).

Therefore, the idea of communalism, as we know it, was a modern phenomenon, something separate from the older discourses of mere cultural difference and, as Prabha Dixit assures, it was, moreover, a political doctrine (3). The modernisation of the Muslim community as heralded by Syed Ahmed, a Bengali nineteenth-century Islamic reformer, was only focused on upper-class Muslims and, in this context, communalism was a convenient tool to gain power (Dixit 56). The conclusion Dixit reaches is that this doctrine of creating a Muslim identity for political ends provoked the birth of Hindu communalism as a reaction to Muslim communalism. The tragic outcome of this was that a strategic positioning through communalism gave way to old grievances becoming magnified within this new political scenario.

Bengal's inevitable partition was in the works long before it became a political reality. The Morley-Minto Administration Reformation Act of 1909, which established separate versus joint elections, entrenched the separation of Hindus and Muslims by splitting the Indian electorate primarily on religious/ethnic grounds, resulted in the 1932 Communal Award. The establishment of opposing modalities of election undoubtedly served to instrumentalize communalism, and the 1909 Morley-Minto reform "stamped the two-nation thesis on the political history of the country," according to Chakrabarty (2004). (152). We must also note the Indian National Congress's failure to integrate Muslims into the nationalist movement, and it is noteworthy that no Muslim leaders attended the 1932 Unity Conference in Allahabad, which was convened to discuss the Award's nefarious effects, as they saw separate electorates as the only way for Bengali Muslims to truly come into power. A communal identity replaced a common Bengali identity, and the aforementioned colonial rubric of divide and rule operated in combination with Muslim leadership's strategic positioning to gain their own new set of privileges. The division of Muslims and Hindus into different political groups contributed significantly to the atmosphere of hostility.

In addition to the 1932 Communal Award, one must consider the shifting socio-economic circumstances in Bengal, particularly the role of Hindu talukdars (landowning lords) who served as mahajans, money lenders, and grain lenders during lean periods. The Great Depression in Bengal in the 1930s had a significant impact on jute demand, making the peasant society much more economically insecure. The Hindu elite was also devastated by the Great Slump, as they were no longer able to fulfil their role as mahajans. This caused a socio-economic divide, as the talukdars lost social legitimacy in East Bengal's Muslim-dominated small peasant economy, and were now seen as parasites (Chakrabarty 48). Muslims of various political persuasions gathered together under a religious flag, giving legitimacy to a communalistic philosophy. The creation of the Krishak Praja Party (KPP) helped galvanise Muslim identity in the face of Hindu economic domination, and the following KPP-Muslim League coalition after the 1937 elections altered the complexion of East Bengal politics (Chakrabarty 2004: 50). Political authorities had an interest in emphasising the zamindar oppressors' religion and, for example, downplaying the Muslim landlords' exploitative role (Chakrabarty 36). As a result, Islam gave the Muslim peasants with a unifying ideology against the zamindars, and their concerns, while originating in questions of class privileges, took on a communal hue (Chakrabarty 2004:86). Certainly, the Bengali bhadralok have always put their own interests first; for example, the Indian Congress, which was dominated by upper-caste Hindus, vetoed the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1928, which proposed to give peasants rights over a traditional zamindar privilege, and the fact that the landless peasants were Muslims made it easier for them to adopt their position. Faced with new political circumstances, this landlord The Hindu class made no meaningful effort to address Muslim worries, and they were more concerned with their own privileges than with opposing foreign control. The Muslim peasantry, particularly in rural East Bengal, perceived Hindu party politics as an instrument of oppression against them, which solidified the idea of political Islam (Chakrabarty 2004: 41).

The Scheduled Castes were likewise impoverished and socially marginalised, which engendered sympathy for the Muslim League, as both Hindus and Muslims were oppressed by a Hindu zamindar elite. However, beginning in 1937, the League Ministry enacted legislation to defend the interests of the Muslim community, resulting in a built-in communal bias in much of the Muslim ministry's legislation in Bengal. These communal devices, overseen by Chief Minister Fazlul Haq, were introduced to address a historical disadvantage (for example, 80 percent of all recruited teachers were now Muslims, with the rest divided between Hindus and Scheduled Castes), but the result was a “unprecedented toxin of communalism,” as Chakraborty (2010) describes it (114). Bengali Hindus banded together under the figure of Rabindranath Tagore to oppose the decline of Hindu status in Bengali politics, believing that they were being marginalised by the increase of Muslim dominance. The Calcutta protest on July 15, 1936, signalled Hindu dissatisfaction, which was mirrored by the Scheduled Castes, who had grown disillusioned with the Bengal Provincial Muslim League. This was exacerbated by the fact that they were equally targeted as high-caste Hindus during the Calcutta and Noakhali riots. As a result, what had previously been a disparate group came together to form a common political identity. The Scheduled Castes, who were traditionally outside of the upper-caste Hindu realm, were suddenly associated with the umbrella term "Hindu," which took on a communalistic identity, particularly in East Bengal. In the view of the higher caste leaders of the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha, re-establishing Hindu control in Western Bengal was thus preferable to national unity, and, as Chatterji has claimed, this political manoeuvring postponed the possibility of a Dalit-Muslim alliance.

The division of Bengal had a trans-regional impact within India and, as Sengupta assures, the violence that erupted between the Bodos and the Muslims (2012) in Assam or the Muzaffarnagar riots of 2013 in Uttar Pradesh are clear examples of this. Chakrabarty, in this respect sees the 2008 Bombay massacre as having its roots in the politics of Partition, and she assures that historically, “the mutual relationship between the Hindus and the Muslims was without any sort of differential hindrance: there was a profound understanding as well as a strong feeling of brotherhood prevailing between the two communities” (147). The outbreaks of violence leading up to demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque (1992), or the 2002 Gujarat pogroms against the Muslim population are just a few examples of how the communalism born out of the violence of Partition continues to play a fundamental role in contemporary Indian life. Communalism, furthermore, is continuing to be instrumentalised for expedient ends and, as Fraser argues, the December 1992 Kolkata riots, which were daubed as a Muslim reaction to the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque Ayodhya were, in fact, a ruse for land grabbing (Fraser 39). In a similar vein, Arundhati Roy in Listening To Grasshoppers: Field Notes On Democracy (2008) evidences how the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in India is directly linked to the strategic manipulation of religious sentiments for political ends. Rather than learning the lessons of Partition, the BJP’s renewing of Hindu exceptionalism stirs up unnecessary and dangerous communal sentiment. Roy provides the specific example of the BJP politician, Varun Gandhi of the Nerhu dynasty, who, in the 2009 Indian election campaign, called for the forced sterilisation of all Muslims as a means to stir up communal animosity and “consolidate his vote bank” (Roy xxxii). Other forms of symbolic violence against Muslims can be seen in the resurgence of what Chakrabarti evidences as the Bengal Legislative Politics between 1912 and 1936 of restricting cow slaughtering in Bengal. This was a historical affront to Muslim sensibilities, yet we have seen a current resurgence of these restrictive practices in January 2017, when the Mumbai High Court upheld the cow slaughter ban in Maharashtra. Communal violence is also present in Bangladesh where aggressive Islamic policy with little regard for religious minorities is also being implemented (despite the fact that the Bangladeshi state was founded upon a secular-socialist principle under the auspicious of the Awami League). The result of this cultural intransigence based on an ideological interpretation of religious practice, has resulted in direct violence against Hindus in 1990 and 1992 “perpetrated in connivance with the state machinery” (Fraser 38). Pakistan, as an ideological entity, was formed upon the idea of the new nation as being a home to Islam, and the rise of Hinduvta ideology in contemporary India is a mirror image of this pernicious coupling of national belonging and faith. Constructing nationhood within this exclusive ideology inevitably leads to the incitement of hatred against the excluded other. In the case of Hindu extremism, it is a convenient subterfuge to mask India’s social ills, such as a persisting caste violence, the appropriation of tribal lands by corporate conglomerates, the continuing impoverishment of a large segment of the population, and so forth. One of the great paradoxes of contemporary Indian society is that, whilst many Hindus no longer support the oppressive nature of the caste system and eschew all forms of communal violence, the dark and unfathomable violence of Partition continues to cast its shadow upon present events.

Provincial Politics in Bengal:

That provincial politics in Bengal after the Communal Award of 1932 shifted towards mass mobilization along communal lines cannot be denied. Scholars have drawn attention to the unique political and demographic landscape of Bengal in the 1930s that ensured an easy conflation between ‘class’ and ‘community’ within mass mobilization efforts of Hindu and Muslim leaders.16 The politics of representation also incorporated issues of peasant rights and freedom from Hindu landlord domination and the cultural flowering of Muslims who could informed by colonial constructions of politically representative religious groups. In the context of Bengali nationalism, Sugata Bose has noted that religion and religious symbols had always informed the cultural identities of both Hindu and Muslim nationalists and had played a crucial role in garnering support of the masses and elite alike against colonial rule. Further, as Partha Chatterjee rightly argues, Muslim politics in Bengal remained circumscribed as they failed to draw the support of the Hindu minority in Bengal.

Veteran Congress leaders such as Nalini Ranjan Sarkar and Kiran Sankar Roy, both originally hailing from eastern Bengal but had made their political career in Calcutta, publicly voiced their reasons for supporting the movement. In a series of public lectures and essay in major newspapers, Nalini Ranjan Sarkar, a veteran of the 1905 anti Partition movement, assured those Hindus who would surely become part of Pakistan in the event of the division that, “In a divided Bengal those Hindus who might be left in East Bengal should have this satisfaction that West Bengal as a separate province would be there as a safe home for Hindu culture and economic interests.” Using the metaphor that the Bengali Hindus were “living in a house on fire,” Sarkar dissociated the call for Partition as a consequence of the Cabinet Mission Plan and stressed that the demand was due to intrinsic problems within the Bengal body politic. “The Hindus have been forced into this position by extreme circumstances” whose roots lay in the ‘communal administration’ of the Bengal Muslim League. He emphasized that, if the present policy of the League in Bengal had undergone a real change and in accordance with that change a constitution was evolved which made it possible for all sections of people to be imbued with the idea of a common citizenship overriding communal distinctions and thereby ruling out any communal domination, then indeed I believe the Hindus of Bengal would not think it necessary to press for a divided Bengal.

The communal-national binary, which aims to explain religious communalism as the causal force, which defined the inevitable path to Partition at the expense of secular nationalism, is one of the fundamental difficulties that has plagued the historiography of the Partition. In sharing this binary, historians from both the Nationalist and Cambridge schools become an odd couple. Although the former undercuts the Cambridge historians' own focus on the anti-colonial nature of distinct groups by isolating the Muslim League as a 'communal' organisation, the latter fails to recognise the core nature of Indian nationalism as an anti-colonial struggle. Anti-colonial nationalism has always been shaped by Hindus' and Muslims' religious and cultural identities, which did not always imply an adversarial communal relationship.

The need to answer the central question, "Why did Partition happen?" has also harmed historiography. Despite the fact that historians agree that the answer is complex, there has been a tendency to describe the Partition as inevitable, as if it were a given conclusion, at least since the 1946 riots. However, as this article has demonstrated, Bengali public opinion remained divided and perplexed when it came to the province's political future. In their demands for Partition and Pakistan, neither the Congress nor the Hindu Mahasabha, not the Muslim League, could claim entire support. When the Congress and the Muslim League openly approved and endorsed Governor Louis Mountbatten's Plan of June 3, 1947, which clearly highlighted the prospect of division, the argument over whether Bengal should be partitioned was put to rest. The certainty of Partition altered the tone of public debate dramatically. Despite the fact that the ground principles for Partition had been established in Delhi and London, the Bengali populace expressed their opinions in the hope of persuading their leaders to choose certain territorial coordinates. Within India, both in terms of area and citizenship, inclusion became a disputed point. On June 20, 1947, the Bengal Legislative Assembly agreed to join the Indian Union. They voted to divide Bengal into East and West Bengal in a separate ballot. The voting was split along communal lines on both topics, despite the fact that the representatives had no means of knowing whether their particular constituencies would end up in east or west Bengal. Delegates from Hindu dominant areas decided to join the Indian Union and split Bengal accordingly, whilst representatives from Muslim majority districts voted for a separate union and opposed Bengal division.

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