Introduction
Hindu nationalism had created a sense of home that combined the sacred with the beautiful. And, even though this sense of home embodied notions of the sacred, it was not intolerant of the Muslim as such. The Muslim—that is, the non-Muslim League Muslim, the Muslim who did not demand Pakistan—had a place in it. . .in this idyllic home, it is the Muslim of the Muslim League who erupts as a figure of enigma, as a complete rupture from the past, a modernist dream of ‘junking the past’ gone completely mad, a discordant image on a canvas of harmony.Footnote 1
The Muslim League was an organization of the Muslims but it stood for the safeguarding of the rights and privileges of all irrespective of caste, creed, and political opinion. I urged upon Muslims to build the fundamentals of Islam and build up your thrones in the heart of every man and woman by your service to humanity and your devotion to truth and sacrifice all you have in the way of God.Footnote 2
As Dipesh Chakrabarty has commented, the role of Muslims in modern Bengal makes a limited appearance in South Asian historiography, partially due to the crippling memory politics of many Hindu refugees in post-1947 Calcutta. In this formula, Muslim Bengalis who may have allied with the Muslim League—like the populist leader Abul Hashim who organized mass support for the Pakistan idea—appear buried to the point of erasure from the Bengali cultural and historical archive. Historians of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab, and the vaunted colonial Indian ‘Muslim minority’ provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed Ali Jinnah, to the odd exclusion of Bengal.Footnote 3 Historians of Bengal, with a few exceptions,Footnote 4 have paid little analytical attention to Muslim politics of Bengal within the context of anti-colonial nationalisms or Bengali cultural history.
Muslims of Bengal have been the subject of numerous studies, starting with the social history efforts of the 1970s and beyond. This literature, however, pre-supposes a fully formed Bengali cultural foundation into which Muslims sought to either include themselves or distance themselves. Unlike the rich literature on early modern Bengal in which boundaries between Hindu and Muslim did not assume the characteristics they did in the modern age, modern Bengali Muslim studies have been slow to incorporate the insights of recent, broader South Asian historiography. Somehow, the late colonial period, and in particular, the 1940s, are skipped over in histories of Bengali Muslims, so that the intellectual embrace of Pakistan appears to be not only due to ‘outside’ Muslim forces, but is also largely unexplained. Though a tradition of Bengali Muslim social history inaugurated by Sufia Ahmed and Rafiuddin Ahmed, continued by Sonia Amin, Shila Sen, D. P. De, and Tazeen Murshid has documented the life-ways of modern Bengali Muslims, there is yet to be a serious attempt to trace how Bengali Muslims participated and constructed new and creative discourses of culture in the name of a nationalist consciousness that defies poles of derivation or endless particularity.Footnote 5
This paper aims to provide a minor corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim conceptualizations and literary imaginings of the idea of Pakistan. Far from merely parroting distant non-Bengalis from far-flung provinces, such as the United Provinces or the Punjab, Bengali Muslim thinkers blended concepts of Pakistan inside the locally grounded histories of Bengali language and literature and worked within geography, political economy, and literary criticism. Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts of Pakistan in poetry, such as Farrukh Ahmed's poem ‘Sat Sagorer Majhi’ (‘The Boatman of the Seven Seas’), with its emphasis on the riverine environment of Bengal and the old Bengali theme of salvation through boatmen, continuing an older Bengali tradition begun in earlier generations, as opposed to simply contending with outside forces.Footnote 6
Bengali Muslim intellectuals grappling with the concept of Pakistan—in the Bengali language and using traditional Bengali idioms—is a set of intellectual labours that holds no clear place in any existing nationalist historiography (Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi). In addition to clarifying the contours of these labours, this paper also places Bengali Muslim late colonial romantic nationalism on a broader transnational discussion of modernism and nationalism. Though this paper can only point to such nationalisms, as opposed to analyzing them in depth, it is hoped that these pointers will provoke further enquiry into modern Bengali and late colonial South Asian history.
Culture, as politics, and as a resource to deploy within the debates about what exactly constitutes a nation, has appeared in terms that historians of South Asia are only just beginning to consider in depth. This paper will detail a constitutive portion of the intellectual history of South Asia outside the pursuit of a state but within the construction of a creative form of modern community through a stridently particular form: language and literature carved out of an experience of social dislocation and alienation.Footnote 7 Late colonial Bengali Muslim intellectual and cultural history remain curiously understudied, as their discourses of modern regional and national identity—demonstrated here through the concept of Pakistan—provide a hugely pivotal, but yet under-conceptualized portion of modern history.Footnote 8 Inclusive of literary critical debates, thoughts on territory and trans-regional identifications within Islam, and actual new literary production itself, the story of Bengali Muslim East Pakistani literary modernism begins in the institutional sphere of Calcutta, a long standing home for the production of literary and intellectual debate and discussion long dominated by the Bengali Hindu bhadralok. Though Muslims had been writing in modern Bengali prose since the late nineteenth century, middle-class bhadralok Hindus had long dominated the discourses around literature, culture, politics, and nationalism. Not quite outside this space, but occupying a marginal role within it, were long standing writers and critics who had been toiling in the ‘Bengali Muslim’ press, writing for Bengali publications that were read primarily by Muslims and hardly noticed by the giants of Bengali literature, like Sarat Chandra Chatterjee or Rabindranath Tagore. The marginal role, however, that Muslims would occupy in discussions of Bengali literature would change with the concepts of ‘Pak-Bangla’ and an oppositional concept of cultural nationalism, grounded in the Bengali language, idioms and history, but rooted in the alternative, creative world of Muslim Bengali literary criticism and production.Footnote 9
The Production of Pak-Bangla
Calcutta's Muslim literary community of the late 1930s and early 1940s was literally and figuratively centred in the offices of newspapers and literary journals such as Azad, Mohammadi, and Saogat. Azad, begun in 1936 by Muhammed Akram Khan and his son Khairul Anam Khan, occupied a well known office in Entally Road in Calcutta. Akram Khan and his family also were behind Mohammadi, both the daily and monthly editions. In the early 1940s, Akram Khan fell seriously ill and the management and editorship of his publications was handed to young rising stars of Bengali Muslim journalism such as Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, Mujibur Rahman Khan, and Abul Mansur Ahmed. These individuals also went on to promote Bengali Muslim literature, enunciate Purba (east) Pakistani autonomy, and articulate a literary-cultural movement of renaissance in the Bengali Muslim community in the mid 1940s.
From the 1920s, Mujibur Rahman Khan and Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, in their journalistic and literary-critical endeavours, started the ideological drive towards articulating an undivided Bengal within a proposed Purba Pakistan, by working for the Azad daily newspaper. By the early 1940s, both had become seasoned journalists with articles published in Bulbul, Saogat, the English-language The Mussalman, and Mohammadi. Mujibur Rahman Khan and Shamsuddin were a part of many literary societies, including the Bengali Muslim Sahitya Samaj, which met infrequently throughout the 1920s, and 1930s, but also their own Naoroze samiti and S. Wajed Ali's Calcutta-based discussions, which continued a tradition begun by Nawab Abdul Latif in the late nineteenth century. Most meetings of these societies, if not at individual's homes, would take place in or around the Azad office, which, much like the Bengali Muslim Sahitya Samaj of the 1910s, or Saogat of the late 1920s, would become a centre for the meeting-space of journalists, writers, and critics of Bengali Muslim society.
In 1940, when Akram Khan became severely ill, Khairul Anam Khan decided that Shamsuddin would become the editor of Azad with Mujibur Rahman Khan as joint co-editor. At this time, Shamsuddin and Mujibur Rahman Khan started yet another literary society, the Sahitya-Sangsad, which would meet weekly at the Azad office. This group included older writers like Moinuddin and Habibullah Bahar of Bulbul, but also included younger writers who were barely in their twenties. These young upstarts included Farrukh Ahmed and Benazir Ahmed, two writers who would publish poetry about the idea of Purba Pakistan later in the decade. They would meet each week in 1940 and 1941 to discuss and present original works of prose, poetry, drama, essay, and political polemic in the Azad and nearby offices.
Debates on the pages of popular Bengali Muslim periodicals such as Mohammadi, Azad, and Saogat in the early 1940s reflected a stage of memorialization and historicity. Bengali Muslim writers, though certainly aiming to create a literature of the future, had by now a literature they could refer to and critique as their own, as opposed to simply working towards inclusion into a Hindu-dominated space, which was the issue facing most Bengali Muslim critics from the 1870s onwards.Footnote 10
Shamsuddin in 1941, for example, proclaimed Nazrul Islam the only true literary ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity in Bengali literature, and therefore the ‘most Bengali’ poet. Unlike Hindu greats like Bankim and Rabindranath, only Nazrul actually included Hindu and Muslim characters, symbols, and concepts with equal respect and skill. Hindu writers like Bankim, though his talent was undeniable, did not address a Muslim audience. When Hindu writers did include Muslims as characters, they did so only in negative ways. But Nazrul truly spoke to the Hindu and Muslim portions of Bengal in a singular way.Footnote 11
In August 1942, with Mujibur Rahman Khan and Shamsuddin at the helm of Azad, and just two months after the most aggressive membership drive of the All-India Muslim League in Bengal to date, the two writers, along with nine colleagues, started yet another literary society. This time, however, the society was expressly dedicated to creating a literature of the future. In the minds of the founders, the society emerged as a natural culmination of years of literary-cultural development in Bengali Muslim letters that merged with the concept of Pakistan. Shamsuddin declared that ‘we understood the call to Pakistan to be not just a political one, but one inspired by and based on literary and cultural strength’.Footnote 12 In the Azad office on Lower Circular Road in Calcutta, Shamsuddin, Mujibur Rahman Khan, Habibullah Bahar, and eight others founded the East Pakistan Renaissance Society.
The East Pakistan Renaissance Society
Meeting throughout August 1942, the group issued a formal declaration of four principles in September. Nearly all the objectives and public speeches were published in Masik Mohammadi from 1942 to 1945, the years when the society was most active. As one of the most vocal leaders of the organization Shamsuddin articulated a broad plan for literary-cultural autonomy in line with the concept of Pakistan. Not exactly a challenge to the so-called ‘Two-Nation Theory’ that alleged the existence of a Hindu Hindustan and a Muslim Pakistan, this plan was rather a revision of that concept to include a fully fledged Bengali Pakistan that had its own unique, and internally understood elements of culture. These elements had not only to be protected, but developed, in the new state of Pakistan.
Shamsuddin interpreted Pakistan as referring to a ‘struggle for freedom not just for one desh, but for many deshes, many jatis, as India is a large federation of jatis’.Footnote 13 From this foundation, Shamsuddin declared the overall mission of the renaissance society to be the promotion of swatantrata, or difference, in literature and culture. Shamsuddin himself recognized during these initial meetings, that such efforts had been happening for many decades and did not merely begin with their organization. But the concept of Pakistan, and specifically of eastern Pakistani renaissance, would crystallize this effort into a revolutionary consciousness amongst Indian Muslims. According to Shamsuddin, earlier literary-critical efforts, even ones of which he had been a part, ‘were not conscious of the struggle of freedom, but now [with the Pakistan concept in play] we were grasping the freedom to create our own literature’.Footnote 14 The usage of ‘Buddhir Mukti’ (‘freedom of the intellect’) was of course a reference to the Muslim Sahitya Samaj (Muslim Literary Society) begun in the 1920s in Dhaka. For the true freedom of Pakistan, and for a renaissance to take place that enabled such freedom, the literary capacities of Bengali Muslims had to be free from any non-Bengali Muslim influences.
Freedom here was to be contrasted with the nominal freedoms guaranteed by politicians, as the freedom of the Renaissance Society concerned cultural, literary, economic, and educational freedom, the creation of a total cultural programme. This definition of culture was not the type of narrowly bounded ‘high life’ as understood in the humanist tradition, but an anthropologically-informed, Tylorian definition understood partially as a site of resistance to prevailing markers of common sense. According to Shamsuddin, Muslims in this formulation of renaissance had been simply imitating various models, be they English, or Hindu. In order to fully realize their capacities, they could not follow Urdu, English, nor Bengali Hindu Bengali, but a Bengali Muslim Bengali whose cultural foundations of a total programme would be the only path towards actual autonomy. Shamsuddin seized on a foundation in the past, so he lamented how Bengali Muslims have forgotten their punthis, their glorious past history, their thriving and important folk culture, and their Muslim democratic natures all in the service of imitation.
Though Mujibur Rahman Khan and Shamsuddin's organization grew in popularity in late 1942 and early 1943, their long-time friend, and Shamsuddin's room mate in Calcutta, Abul Mansur Ahmed, was not initially supportive of the ideas behind Pakistan and not at all supportive of the All-India Muslim League, as it was then constituted. Abul Mansur Ahmed found the League to be nothing more than a communal organization, manned by well-positioned elites redolent of special interests. Managers of these interests would never take account of the masses of Bengali Muslim peasants who suffered from exploitation in rural Bengal, often from fellow Muslims. When confronted about this, Shamsuddin in a heated discussion declared that Abul Mansur Ahmed's characterization of the All-India Muslim League was rather a Congress, Hindu-centric type of misunderstanding of the Pakistan demand. Shamsuddin referred him to the actual text of the Lahore ResolutionFootnote 15 and how Congress mistakenly promoted the false idea that India was one unified desh, when in reality, it was a collection of various groups and communities. Abul Mansur Ahmed responded affirmatively, agreeing with the widely held perception of Jinnah as a modern secularist, not a Muslim communitarian, but a fighter for minority rights. To give him more food for thought, Shamsuddin lent his friend Mujibur Rahman Khan's recently published book Pakistan, replete with philosophical, anthropological, and geographical ruminations about why Pakistan was the answer to the problems of 1940s India.
Pakistan was published in 1942 by the Mohammadi Press on Lower Circular Road, the site of so many addas, literary society meetings, the Azad newspaper and, from mid-1942 onwards, the East Pakistan Renaissance Society. It therefore emerged directly from this environment of Bengali Muslim literary and intellectual engagement, which stretched back several decades. This book was the first published attempt in Bengali to intellectually outline the Pakistan idea in Bengal. With Shamsuddin's foreword emphasizing how Pakistan was a solution to the problems of colonial India not just for Indian Muslims, but for all of India, the book appeared firmly in the tradition of the 1940 Lahore Resolution.
Two factors squarely planted Mujibur Rahman Khan's conception of Pakistan into a revolutionary and inspirational framework. First, Pakistan's entire existence as a new nation would base itself on language and literature. He cited a galaxy of models, like the writers of France and Russia, whose literature provided the basis for their respective nationalist sources of selfhood. In India, Bengali Hindus have a long list of comparable authors, like Bankim and Rabindranath, and Indian Muslims have Iqbal. Though Iqbal did not originally mention Bengal in his early ruminations about Indian Muslim culture, Mujibur Rahman Khan merely continued a Bengali tradition of appreciating Iqbal's philosophical and inspirational power for Indian Muslims.Footnote 16 As Iqbal was a pioneer in Indian Muslim letters and one of the architects of the idea of Pakistan, the book argued that all the political manoeuvres of Pakistanism in his name should enable Bengali Muslims to find their own Pakistan in their own language.
In addition to language, the book argued that minorities in a centralized colonial set-up, whether from the British imperial, or the Hindu-led Akhand Bharat-styled Congress (as the Congress was merely following the British imperial method of governance in their assumption of an indivisible India, in Mujibur Rahman Khan's term), would always be disempowered in relation to the majority. With the inspiration coming from the distinctive Bengali Muslim experience, the idea of Pakistan aimed to universalize the minority problem. It would provide the means for all groups, including possibly Dravidians into a Dravidistan or Sikhs into a Sikhistan, to fully realize their self-determined existence. Though the practical dimensions of such possible self-determination were not outlined, the idea was seen as an inspiration for all minority groups in India. Like the Pakistan theorists of other parts of India, the precise details of this entire programme were not given but rather made a rhetorical effect on the situation facing Indian Muslim activists of the era.
After reading this book, Abul Mansur Ahmed came to one of the East Pakistani Renaissance Society meetings in Calcutta and had become an ardent admirer of the goal of protecting minorities in a future post-colonial India, outlined in the book. In the book's second edition, Abul Mansur Ahmed contributed a foreword describing his conversion into a Pakistanibadi. Initially, he felt sceptical of how a movement that invoked religion so vaguely might be vulnerable to a takeover by mullahs and religious leaders, but how now he began to promote Pakistan as a universalist and revolutionary attack on unjust majoritarian governance.
Abul Mansur Ahmed then attended every Renaissance Society meeting in Calcutta in 1943 and 1944. In 1943, both the Calcutta and Dacca societies held large-scale meetings promoting their cause. The proceedings of both these meetings were published in the popular Mohammadi and received widespread circulation in the non-Muslim publications of the time as well. To establish the revolutionary nature of the Pakistan idea, he stated that Pakistan was not defined by religion, but yet was inspired by Islam. Bengali Pakistan was highly specific to the local environment, as it was allied to agriculture and cultivation, language, and civilization. His conception of Pakistan based itself on a concept of culture as a totality of life, with religion simply being inside that totality. Ahmed's Pakistan was a revolutionary agenda aiming at absolute social and political change. Because all groups would be respected in this new political formation, Pakistan for Ahmed was a revolutionary concept. By stabbing at the heart of nationalism's assumption that it represented all communities, Ahmed saw revolution in how Pakistan was based not on the idea of a nation that represented all groups, but on the preservation of self-determination for all groups. The agenda of the East Pakistan Renaissance Society was to provide total and absolute freedom:
Pakistan is not just for the ten crores of Muslims and their ‘community’—it is a claim for the thirty crores of minorities in India and their full religious, agricultural, and geographic and territorial rights. ‘Pakistan’ has provided inspiration and hope for the common people of India to voice their own identities and aspirations and has given a language of freedom for all jatis.
The intellectual efforts of Abul Mansur Ahmed and Shamsuddin in 1942 and 1943 transformed the Lahore Resolution into a tangible reality based on notions of a specifically Bengali Muslim variant of new-nation-statehood. They did not oppose the centralizing dictates of the All India Muslim League, but rather celebrated the foundations of Muslim ‘difference’ in ways that would accommodate the larger trends of Bengali Muslim intellectual life.
After the Calcutta and then a later Dacca festival in 1943, the East Pakistan Renaissance Society set out to plan a large, interdisciplinary anusthan with sub-groups like Economics, Cultural Programmes, and Publications. Organized on the model of previous Bengali Muslim Literary Society events that had been taking place since the 1910s, but larger and inclusive of more groups, the society held this programme in July 1944, again at Calcutta's Islamia Hall. To find and document local forms of music and folk performance, the managers of the organization set out in search of local masters of these forms, in the deep interior of East Bengal, such as Sylhet, Mymensingh, Rangpur, Faridpur, Comilla, and Chittagong. Collecting folklore and preserving it scientifically had been in process for decades informally, but now it had an overtly nationalist purpose.Footnote 17
Nearly all the main players of Bengali Muslim politics attended this three-day festival. Even those not necessarily aligned with a Bengali cultural orientation, like Nazimuddin and Suhrawardy attended each day's events. Elder Bengali Muslim peasant populists, like Fazlul Huq and Tamizuddin Khan attended alongside Hindu writers and activists like Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyaya, Bankim Mukherji, and Gopal Halder. The number of younger generation writers who began to link with the society increased as individuals like Abu Jafr Shamsuddin, Talebur Rahman, and Farrukh Ahmed joined more seasoned litterateurs like S. Wajed Ali and Golam Mostafa. The festival was therefore the epicentre of Bengali Muslim literary, intellectual, and political engagement and a meeting of inter-generational energies all dedicated to Bengali Muslim self-definition.
In Ahmed's terms, religion was trans-regional even if all the nations that professed the same religion were not politically or culturally united. The Muslims of India and Muslims all over the world theoretically did share a universalist, trans-regional sensibility. This was a part of religion's strength and beauty. For Bengali Muslims, the religion of Islam did provide one portion of the basis for Bengali Muslim culture. Indeed, what Abul Mansur Ahmed posed as ‘Bengali culture’ countered commonly held definitions of culture set by the Bengali Hindu bhadralok. In the outline of this religiously informed culture, Ahmed cited the most liberal parts of the Qur'ān as the basis of Pakistan. Ahmed's example is the surah, al-Qafirun 109: 06, which states ‘to you your religion and to me, mine’. Ahmed translates this in Bengali as ‘Tomar dharma tomar, amar dharma amar’ (‘your religion is yours, my religion mine’) and further states that ‘Koraner e udar bani Pakistaner gorar katha’ (‘This liberalism is the foundation of Pakistan’).Footnote 18
But culture, or as he began to call it, tamaddun (ironically, an Urdu word)Footnote 19 did not possess trans-regional powers and only existed within a particular territorial, linguistic, and sub-linguistic (Bengali Muslim as opposed to general Bengali) region. And for full freedom and self-determination to occur, these self-contained, territorially bound cultures must develop to their full potential. The historical, as opposed to the anthropological or theoretical, meaning of culture as understood by these writers did include a space for modernist experimentation and futurism. Though a focus on distinctiveness through a specific literary past was emphasized, the very nature of creating an oppositional literature and critical space was itself a new innovation.
The way forward would not be an imitative model, as Rabindranath himself, hailed as a great world poet by Abul Mansur Ahmed, did not reach such heights by imitating Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Milton. Citing the Irish case, no Irish writer ever attained stature in London, but had to find a distinctive Celtic voice in Irish soil, to truly capture the Irish experience. To that end, Ahmed strongly advocated the awareness of punthis and non-Bengali Hindu forms of Bangla writing as a part of the Bengali Muslim ecumene. He did not urge people to start writing punthis along the lines of early modern stars of Bengali Muslim literature like Daulat Qazi or Alawal, but to use them as an inspiration for a model of literature that was independent from any outside influence, like Bengali Hindu or Western models. Finally, he advocated the conscious usage of words and phrases like aju-ghosal, khana, pani, allah, khoda, roza, namaj, words that he claimed were ‘always seen as foreign non-Bengali words in the halls of Bengali departments at universities’.Footnote 20 This issue had been alive since the late 1910s, but now, it took shape in the form of a national movement. By 1944, Abul Mansur Ahmed had experienced a wealth of bigotry at the hands of Hindus who hegemonically controlled Bengali literary publication.
The broader sentiment of a cultural autonomy that included religion but distinguished itself from Hindu co-culturists and non-Bengali co-religionists had been variously expressed in different formats but without any unified political programme. With the introduction of the concept of Pakistan, such an autonomous space now made plausible ideological sense. It, however, was tied to a highly temporal conjunction of a variety of commitments that sensibly were fused into a larger programme, of the trans-regional ‘seed’ of religion, the regional ‘tree’ of Bengal, and a broader embrace of decolonization against centralizing, and imperialist tendencies in the Congress.Footnote 21
These Muslim Bengali writers connected various forces at play in late colonial Bengali history, such as the rising Muslim middle class in Calcutta, rising migrations from rural Eastern Bengali locations into Calcutta, and a productive relationship between rural points of origin and new urban spaces of literary production. These writers held intimate relations with their points of origin in Dacca and various mufassil locales. It remained however, the unavoidable fact of late colonial Bengal that Calcutta was the educational and literary centre for modern writing and knowledge dissemination; this fact should not blind readers to the non-Calcutta-centric and pan-Bengali reach of their work.
Territorial limits of East Pakistan
In addition to generating energy and excitement as well as outlining the theoretical concept of Purba Pakistan, the meetings also clarified territorial boundaries of the potential limits of East Pakistan in its display of several maps, particularly in the 1944 grand meeting in Calcutta. In September 1944, in the midst of long-awaited talks between Jinnah and Gandhi, Mujibur Rahman Khan published a booklet, entitled Eastern Pakistan: Its Population, Delimitation, and Economics that clarified the political-economic and territorial goals of the society. The maps in the booklet were the same as the maps in the 1942 book and included all of eastern Bengal, Assam, Sylhet, excluded Burdwan and a small part of Murshidabad, but significantly, included Calcutta. The author claimed that if the non-Bengali Hindu migratory aliens were excluded, Muslims would then be in a slight majority in Calcutta and so it should be included in East Pakistan. There was no discussion, however, of the non-Bengali Muslim migratory aliens who also formed a large part of the Muslim population.Footnote 22
Regardless of the discussions about territory that were going on in the mid-1940s, it was clear that Purba Pakistan society members were advocating the existence of two separate states, not one Pakistan state. However, the ideological contours of constructing a Bengali Muslim politico-economic platform formed an odd appropriation of the literary-cultural basis behind Purba Pakistan. As evidenced by this booklet's claims about culture and history, politics and economics conflicted with the claims of cultural nationalism, as the assumptions behind Bengali Muslim politico-economic independence were quite different from the assumptions behind the instantiation of cultural nationalism.
In the accounts of boundary disputation and economic development, as detailed in the booklet, the discourse follows from both the basic Lahore Resolution principles and also from its Purba Pakistan variant, as self-sufficiency, in developing natural resources, modernized agriculture, and port city development are all examined at length. The style of government would be a federation that would include the small ‘native states’ such as Cooch Behar or Manipur, they would in a true Pakistan spirit, be incorporated into a federation. But when the booklet delved into the human resources of East Pakistan, in an entire chapter devoted to the theme, it veers into wholly different territory. Employing a nineteenth century view of martial races and ethnicized difference, the author's chapter on the alleged martial race quality of Bengalis leads him to construct a working defence of the ‘martial’ character of the Muslims of Bengal. The author accepts the long-standing allegation that ‘the name Bengalee is reserved for the Hindus of Bengal and Musalmans of Bengal are simply known as Musalmans. The Muslims of Bengal cannot be styled a non-martial people by any stretch of [the] imagination’.Footnote 23
Mujibur Rahman Khan supported this assertion by citing the valour and courage of the many Muslims who fought in Sayyid Ahmed of Rai Bareilly's jihads in the Punjab in the late 1820s,Footnote 24 noticed by people like William Hunter and James O'Kineally. The importance of recognizing the ‘martial’ nature of these Muslims of Bengal was that this inherent fighting quality would prepare them to create a viable state, as
the formation of an eastern Pakistan state where Islam and Muslim culture will have a free scope to develop, will supply the necessary stimulus to the Muslims of Bengal, to make them one of the best specimens of the fighting men of the world. Hence the military quality of the peoples of eastern Pakistan may be safely assumed to be good enough to make it a strong state.Footnote 25
Hunter's observations about the Muslims of Bengal in the nineteenth century, that ‘they were the superior race, and superior not only in stoutness of heart and strength in arms, but in power of political organization and in the science of political government’Footnote 26 led the author to conclude, hopefully, that if the Muslims of Bengal were so superior only a century earlier, there would be no reason not to attain such superiority now.
Mujibur Rahman Khan's 1944 booklet's reliance on separating the Bengali Hindu from the ‘Musalman’ of Bengal created an impression that the Muslims of Bengal were never ‘Bengalis’ but rather always ‘Muslims of Bengal’. In this formulation, however, there was no recognition of the shared culture from which Muslims had definitively taken. There was also no recognition of how Bengali Muslims, as Abul Mansur Ahmed would have said, as opposed to the Muslims of Bengal, were excluded from the potential to attain self-determination. In Mujibur Rahman Khan's presentation, the Muslims of Bengal had not yet become Bengali Muslims, even though the entire point of the society was to press upon colonial India their existence! In the presence of a ‘Pakistan demand’, the details of these potential problems were not engaged or questioned. The booklet reinforced the idea of East Pakistan as a bounded territory, not only an imagined entity for cultural freedom, but a real, tangible place inhabited by an ecological unity.
The Purba Pakistan concept was outlined in other texts, such as Habibullah Bahar's series of essays on the Pakistan demand, published in 1941 and 1942, which followed closely the global Soviet commentary on the self-determination of nations.Footnote 27 Bahar was the editor of Bulbul in the 1930s, a public supporter of the East Pakistan Renaissance Society, and a close friend of Mujibur Rahman Khan. In Bahar's 1942 essay, he appends Khan's maps used in the book Pakistan. Framed by the claim that Pakistan was a concept worked out in political science attentive to various facts on the ground misinterpreted by nationalists promoting an Akhand Bharat stance, Bahar's entire thesis is grounded self-determination buttressed both by Soviet commentators like Stalin and by historical references to Lenin and Wilson, both of whom were staunch rhetorical supporters of self-determination. Wilson, unlike Lenin, categorically did not support the emancipation of the colonies but Bahar cited him anyway.
Like Mujibur Rahman Khan, Bahar claimed that there was no organic ‘nation’ in India. According to Bahar, the idea of India as a unitary nation was an illusion fronted by Akhand Bharat propagandists. Rather, echoing the All India Muslim League's official position, India was rather a collection of various jatis and communities. With this in mind, he stated how the Congress was using outdated, parliamentary centralized models of governance that will go only in a modern European direction. So he listed the League's principles: 1) Akhand Bharat was a myth; 2) British centralized parliamentary government did not suit India; 3) every group deserved self-determination. In order to flesh out the claim that Akhand Bharat was a myth, he listed and described the great racial, cultural, economic, and linguistic diversity of India. In one section, like Mujibur Rahman Khan, he lists the seven races of Hindus the census has counted and uses this as a basis to argue that even within the Hindu ‘jati’ there is racial diversity. About language, Bahar claims that nearly 25,000 punthis in Musalmani Bangla exist, but Hindus do not want to claim this as Bengali.Footnote 28
To press the point that the Pakistan demand was not simply about Muslim identity, he argued with the support of British official opinion, that the only political unity of India was an administratively imposed political unity in the British period. Therefore, to Bahar only British imperialism was the form of governance that politically unified India. If we understand this fact, we may then observe how the two main groups opposed to Akhand Bharat-Muslims and Dravidians, were both pushing for self-determination. He listed Dravidistan as merely a natural outgrowth of Indian politics itself.Footnote 29 There must be, on the Russian model, a system that recognizes self-determination of groups, if they so choose, and if you put the choice to them, it is not necessary for them to secede, they may work out a power-sharing confederacy plan, as the Soviet Union did. This and not the foreign concept of ‘nation’ or ‘nationalism’ should buttress any decolonization. He quoted Rabindranath in the late 1890s, as an example of how ‘nations’ as a concept as a form of governance simply do not fit the Indian case, at least insofar as they come from a European context.Footnote 30 Finally, he cites Lenin and Wilson as providing a long-standing tradition of respecting self-determination, in rhetoric, if not in practice.
The model espoused by Bahar clearly merged with the Indian Communist Party's understanding of the Pakistan demand. Dr Gangadhar Adhikari, in a report given to the central committee, elaborated on the party line as it related to Bengal. In general, it stood for a free and voluntary association of nationalities, a federation in which ‘provinces where Muslims form the overwhelming majority of the population could form autonomous units and even have the right to secede’.Footnote 31
But when discussing the idea of Pakistan, Adhikari elaborated a bit after the Pakistan idea had floated around for a few years. In 1943, he clarified the distinction between ‘a just quest for autonomy and a separatist two-nation theory’Footnote 32 as the Communist Party supported the former. Regarding the rising power of Muslim identity, he claimed that the Communist Party did not see communalism in the Pakistan demand, but ‘the rise of anti-imperialist nationalist consciousness among the Muslim masses’.Footnote 33 Echoing the sentiments of Bahar, the report said that the denial of self-determination for one group would deny it for all.
East Bengal presented a unique case unlike any other portion of Muslim India, as the Muslim peasantry of Bengal has its own distinct cultural and geographical characteristics. It was, in their terms, a ‘transitional form’ and their unique elements of culture and socio-economic situatedness should be recognized. Sushobhan Sarkar, another communist who supported the East Pakistan Renaissance Society, suggested that the very existence of a Purba, as opposed to a united, Pakistan, meant that India consisted of many nationalities.
Adhikari's Pakistan and National Unity was directly cited as support for the arguments of the geographer Nafis Ahmed, in his The Basis of Pakistan, which appeared in 1947. The principles of self-determination, as well as citations of the international world of decolonization and how borders are man-made, British inventions that may be changed for the better, appears in the book. Pakistan is an ideological attack on unitary all-India nationalism, emphatically not a principle of Muslim ontology or communal difference. As Bahar also argues, Ahmed claims that Akhand Bharatists ‘ignore the socio-religious realities and the atmosphere of seclusion and different historico-religious conceptions of the two peoples’.Footnote 34
Another aspect of the Pakistan demand explicitly mentioned in Ahmed, and in scattered citations throughout the East Pakistan Renaissance Society, was the role of World War II and the formulation of a policy of decolonization. Ahmed claims that during the war years, the creation of subsidiary war factories and massive profiteering and corruption led to large unemployment and, buttressed by the famine, extreme poverty. Pakistan would help lift Bengal out of this situation through attention to the economic and social capacities of the East Bengali region, allowing it to develop its own industries and ‘limited proletariat’. Echoing quasi-socialist interpretations of Jinnah, and certain Bengal Provincial Muslim League leaders like Abul Hashim, Ahmed claims that Pakistan would be an equitable and socially just state where citizens would live without fear of economic exploitation. The duty of Muslims of Bengal and of India as a whole was to ‘visualize a people's Pakistan, as the concept of Pakistan is political and not religious’.Footnote 35 Citing nineteenth century writers like Sayyid Ameer Ali and Jinnah in the same vein, the inspiration for Pakistan arose because of ‘charity, brotherhood, social justice, and equal opportunity’, guaranteed under Islam.Footnote 36
It would certainly be historically suspect to avoid any discussion of those Bengali Muslims who opposed the Pakistan ideal. Rezaul Karim, a life-long Congressman, wrote detailed refutations of the Pakistan idea. He matches Abul Mansur Ahmed and Abul Kalam Shamsuddin with a discussion of religion and culture, but takes great exception to culture being used to denote difference or power, whereas it marked sameness for Karim. Published in Calcutta in 1941 just before the East Pakistan Renaissance Society was coming into being, his Pakistan Examined was a polemical response to the Pakistan demand.Footnote 37
The conception of the Pakistan demand Karim cited was most probably the type of discourse Abul Mansur Ahmed responded to in his 1944 address. Like Ahmed, Karim did explicitly differentiate religion from culture, but the concept of ‘culture is vague, ambiguous, and full of numerous interpretations. . .the word is generally used to exploit the ignorance of the masses’.Footnote 38 He did admit the existence of cultural identity, but refused to believe that a Muslim, as a member of a religion, automatically then followed a ‘Muslim’ culture, as ‘many Muslims adopt a culture which is neither Islamic nor Hindu, so also the Hindus’.Footnote 39 For Karim, culture was an organic expression of place and environment, so it ‘assimilates, adapts, and amalgamates all the surrounding conditions of the age’ and so, therefore, Hindus and Muslims hold a common culture brought out by their environment. It is not, then, as the East Pakistan Renaissance Society held, a reflection of hegemonic power relations.
In addition to seeing ‘culture’ as a natural, rather than malleable and a politically purposeful site of social change, Karim also interpreted the influence of British imperialism in complete opposition to the Renaissance Society line. Whereas Bahar and the Renaissance Society clearly saw the Congress’ ‘Akhand Bharat’ unified stance as a reflection of imperialist thinking, Karim believed that the Pakistan demand may be ‘a clever hint of the imperialistic power to keep alive the dying embers of communalism’.Footnote 40 Karim also mentions how it was imperialist to think of division, whereas Bahar and the East Pakistan Renaissance Society saw it the other way around.
Other intellectuals prominent in Bengali Muslim public life, such as S. Wajed Ali, Kazi Abdul Wadud, and Humayun Kabir were not supportive of conceptions of Pakistan. S. Wajed Ali's ‘Bharatbarsha’ a 1945 essay about the dangers of the division of Bengal on religious lines, includes a cogent vision of community that did not accept the Pakistan idea for Bengali Muslims.Footnote 41
Literary imaginings
Regardless of detractors, the Pakistan movement did find expression in more than just theory. Many society members practiced what they preached in the form of Purba Pak literature. From 1942 through 1947, a generation of writers, some from earlier eras like Golam Mostafa, and younger poets like Farrukh Ahmed and Benazir Ahmed, waxed philosophical and cultural about Pakistan. The implementation of the Purba Pakistan ideal into poetic practice was not a uniform occurrence, but it articulated the Pakistan demand in poetry, outside of political theory. This poetry of Pakistan blended a variety of images and points of view into an aesthetic that productively combined the Bengali and Muslim components of identity and culture as a continuation of pre-existing forms into a new idiom celebrating Pakistan. Though not exactly a cohort in the sociological sense, two generations of rising nationalist writers begin to write vigorously on topics of Bengali Muslim literature and culture: the first, the generation of Nazrul Islam born in the 1890s and writing from the 1920s and the next generation, born in the 1910s and 1920s, writing in the 1940s and 1950s. Writers like Farrukh Ahmed, popular in the 1940s, counted as his teachers Golam Mostafa, and attended school with the luminary Satyajit Ray. Most attended school and/or university in Calcutta and Dacca and honed their literary and polemic skills alongside a range of compatriots—Hindu and Muslim—and therefore belong firmly in the social context of Bengali literary history. Though the concept of Pakistan originated from outside the province, from 1942 onwards, a range of thinkers created ideas of Pakistan in the Bengali language and couched their ideas within specifically Bengali histories of linguistic and literary traditions.
On an aesthetic level, the poetry behind Pakistan in Bengali inherited the long tradition begun by Nazrul Islam of using Persian and Arabic words and imagery as well as characters and themes from Islamic history in a modern frame.Footnote 42 Particularism and universalism were brought together in his new idealization of a political future. Writers of the generation active in the 1940s, had grown up in a world after the birth of path-breaking institutions like Saogat, a periodical formed in 1918 by Mohammed Nasiruddin to advance Bengali Muslim writing, debate, and critical consciousness, the 1927 revival and continuation of the journal Mohammadi, as well as the 1936 formation of Azad, a Bengali language political daily that recorded the thoughts and missives of a burgeoning Bengali Muslim literary public sphere. By 1944, when the Pakistan idea was spreading throughout the various reaches of Bengal, Bengali Muslim writers were not only working within a literary tradition but also were supported by these institutional forces that enabled an increasing number of publications and a higher numbers of readers.
Abul Mansur Ahmed's exhortations about creating a national Bengali Muslim literary culture did manifest, to some degree, in the varied poetic writings supporting the idea of Pakistan. As it was initiated in the late 1910s, this was not a new phenomenon, but Islamic ideals that already had a presence in Bengali Muslim literature—equality, justice, brotherhood, deliverance from oppression—acquired a new level of consciousness with the introduction of the concept of Pakistan. It also reciprocally produced more images of Bengali language, culture, and social life within a trans-regional frame.
Golam Mostafa evoked trans-regional Islamic themes in his literary descriptions of Pakistan. Though he wrote profusely in Bengali (The Song of Pakistan), a song which depicts Jinnah as ‘the Aladdin of the New Age’. Amongst his Pakistan songs, his most popular included both ‘Pakistani Jatiya Sangit’ (‘Pakistan's National Song’) and ‘Pakistan-er Bhatiyali Sangit’ (‘Pakistan's Bhatiyali Music’),Footnote 43 both published in 1945 in Mohammadi.
Both songs clearly heralded the coming of a new age when ‘new soldiers would come forth to fight for Pakistan, bringing forth a new Eid’ (Arabic for festival or holiday, often referring to Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan) and when the azan (Muslim call to prayer) would be called by a new Bilal (muezzin, or one who calls the Muslim faithful to prayer).Footnote 44 In ‘Pakistaner Bhatiyali Sangit’, Mostafa connected pre-existing Bengali poetic imagery—that of boatmen, rivers, and salvation—to the Pakistan context, as he exhorted his readers to ‘take him on a boat to the new kingdom of Pakistan’ for salvation where everything, including the water, the air, and the prayer would all be sweeter.Footnote 45
Another man of the Nazrul generation, Shahadat Hossein, wrote ‘Awban’ (‘Call’) also in 1945. Also printed in the Mohammadi, this poem concerns salvation and freedom, without clear references to Bengal, but with constant references to victory and pride, embodied by the new flag of Pakistan. In addition to not referencing Bengal directly, Islam and Muslims were also not explicitly mentioned. This poem is about the coming into being of a new form of political governance, a new state, and a new world in which all people, including Dravidians would hold their heads up high.
Talim Hossein's ‘Gan’ (‘Song’) evoked much the same but translated abstract ideals of justice into a trans-regional Islamic poetic language. In this poem, published in Mohammadi in 1947, a ‘pak-Islami sultanate’ or a pure, Islamic government would reign in the new land of Pakistan, bringing light to darkness in a land enveloped by both darkness and ignorance (julum) as well as oppression (majlum). Pakistan emerges as a Muslim response to this oppression, as ‘azad habe go’ (‘freedom will happen’) in a land where Islam will reign free, ‘marked by the flag of a new moon’ (‘jagibe nishane natun chand’).Footnote 46
This sort of Islamic universalism did not exclude a consciousness of India inside this Bengali poetic expression. Mufakharul Islam's 1944 ‘Tarana-i-Pakistan’ (Song of Pakistan) discusses how India is a land where people, those oppressed (majlum), cry out for a saviour (tran), though the actual content of oppression and dissatisfaction is not exactly spelled out. India's actual fate, though, was dependent on the azadir furman (the order of freedom) in which all mysteries will be exposed. Pakistan is the end result, the manifestation of this order, in which individuals will be delivered from their state of darkness. Pakistan is freedom's last step, the last stage in the progress of India. Though prayer is mentioned, Islam as a separate religion or particular force bringing about freedom is not discussed. Rather, Pakistan, regardless of its relationship to any religion, is the method of deliverance and salvation. The order of freedom is the real subject of the poem and the author's vision of Pakistan. Though it is particularized for the salvation of Indian Muslims, Pakistan remains a pan-Indian solution to the problems of India's politics.Footnote 47
Mufakharul Islam contributed a similar poem only two years earlier in 1942. In his ‘Ruje Pakistan’ he combined both ideals of justice and freedom with explicit links to the Islamic world and Islam as the catalyst for deliverance from subjugation. Here we find an extraordinary example of the link between the politics of Muslim identity and the conception of social justice emanating from Islam. The poem begins with a narration of how Islam itself came upon people immersed in ignorance, darkness, and nearly upon death. Similarly, Muslims of India are in a situation of danger, but with the ‘sweetness of tauhid’ (monotheism or unity of God), Muslim India has the tools to break out of their hopeless situation. Finally, Muslims have to confront who they really are, qua Muslims. As such, he included several lines beginning with the proclamation of ‘I am Muslim’ in various contexts, in terms of political power, in terms of peace, in terms of prayer practices, and beliefs. But the poem ends with the author declaring to God that he is a Muslim born and raised in India, and that the meaning of Islam is to eradicate injustice, to develop mankind, and to cleanse all impurities from humanity.Footnote 48
Whereas Mufakharul Islam and Talim Hossein's poetry remained either abstract or directly referencing Muslims and Islam, other poets, like Roushan Ijdani, interpreted jalim and majlum as affecting all Indians, Hindu or Muslim. In his ‘Jagibe Abar Mahabharat’, (‘Great India will Rise Again’) published in 1947, he lists both Hindu and Muslim reference points like Yudhisthir, Janaki-Ram, Arjun, Mortaza Ali, Haidari, and a galaxy of historical Hindus and Muslims, including a call to Shiraj-ud-daula, as those who will rise to answer the call to freedom for Indians enduring the common source of oppression, the British Raj. Pakistan, in Ijdani's poem ‘Raigir’, written in 1947 but published later in 1949, the new state would be a land where ‘milon-maitri-samyer hukumat’, or the authority of equality, friendship, and harmony, would rule.Footnote 49
These were ideas put into all-India and trans-regional Islamic, terms. But Bengal as a region was also referenced in multiple ways. First, long-standing Bengali poetic themes common to pre-Pakistan, and pre-Nazrul poetry, including the images of boatmen and salvation, appear in the Pakistan poems. In particular, Farrukh Ahmed carried through Nazrul's aesthetic mingling of the Bengal ethnoscape with a trans-regional Islamic sensibility, by imagining how Pakistan would be a saviour delivering freedom to the land of aush dhan, or the land of paddy fields, in Bengal.
Published in 1944 in Mohammadi as well as in his book Sat Saghorer Majhi (The Boatmen of the Seven Seas), the poem serves as a key example of how both Nazrul's inheritance and the emotive force of the East Pakistan idea manifested in Bengali Muslim literature. The poem narrates a downtrodden time for India, when faith, action, and life itself were on the wane. Through the rise of the Prophet Muhammed, and exemplary heroes, like Umar and Ali, the world had seen the triumph of peace, but the poet continually asks for a sign, for any deliverance from this plundered world, and from a world of tyrants and oppression. Continually throughout the poem, Farrukh Ahmed asks if the great flag of Islam, of liberalism, of peace, and justice will flow again in this ‘aush dhaner desh’ or the land of paddies, referring to Bengal. Just like Nazrul in his path-breaking poetry of the early 1920s, Farrukh Ahmed ends his ‘Nishan’ with a merging of spatial and cultural references, as he hopes that the ‘wonderful weight of Mecca’ will shine on this ‘aush dhaner desh’. As opposed to a statement directly about Pakistan, this poem rather signals the search for Islamic legitimacy in a Bengali framework. Farrukh Ahmed's work stands as a representation of this moment of confluence in Bengali history: the use of images of boatmen, the Bengali landscape, and rice fields, as the environment for Pakistan contributed both to Bengali literature and the expanded the idea of Pakistan.
The direct influence of Nazrul also appeared in the writing of Sufi Julkifar Haidar.Footnote 50 His life course also followed a similar trajectory. From a family of Persian scholars and writers, Haidar was proficient in Persian, Arabic, and, also, punthis from a young age. He also fought in World War I in Iraq and returned at the close of the war in 1919. During the inter-war period, he followed literary developments closely but in 1942, retired from his office job and began to write poetry full-time, mostly about the Pakistan movement.
His first book of poetry, Bhanga Talwar (Broken Sword), appeared in 1945. Though many poems in the book contained nothing about politics or Islam, the political poems in the book fit with the prevailing tenor of trans-regional Islamic sentiment and anti-colonial critique. In ‘Kofiyat’ (‘Explanation’), he asked how long the ‘inhuman oppression’ of India will last in the present age. In another poem of the book, titled ‘Islam’, he directly equated Islam with equality, stating that ‘Islam samyabadir dharma/Sakaler tare sakale amra/mora sobai jano bhai bhai’ (‘Islam is a religion of equality/Everyone is ours/we are all brothers’).Footnote 51 These sentiments were stated in almost this exact fashion 20 years earlier in Nazrul's ‘Samyabadi’ poems in Langol.Footnote 52 Haidar also equated Pakistan as the carrier of freedom in ‘Takbir’, also in the same book. In this poem, he writes that ‘Pakistaner naya raha dhare muktir pathe chale’ (‘Let us take the new road, the path to freedom in Pakistan’) and that ‘jeta majlum nirbhoi-aar/haq-hishyar habe dabidar’ (‘fearlessly, oppression will be taken away by justice’).Footnote 53 His work also put the striving for Pakistan in jihadist terms. Taking from a long tradition of jihadist discourse in South Asia,Footnote 54 his ‘Hushiar Ho Sabdhan’ (‘Helmsman, Be Careful!’) sees Jinnah as the leader of crores of jihadist Muslims seeking freedom. Jihad is not included as a specific political or spiritual event, but was used as a symbol of a struggle for freedom.Footnote 55
The ideological effects of poetry written by and for the Pakistan demand were as varied in style and content as the writers themselves—some had vague communist backgrounds, like Farrukh Ahmed, and some staunchly opposed communism, like Golam Mostafa and Syed Ali Ahsan. A few, such as Benazir Ahmed, wrote convincingly on how Islam and communism actually matched. Some, such as Syed Ali Ahsan, adhered to a total rejection of all that was not strictly Bengali Muslim, whereas others, such as Aminul Islam Chaudhuri, did accept a notion of an all-Bengali culture informing their sense of autonomy. But all emphasized the sentiment that Pakistan would equal a deliverance out of a negative state of ignorance, tyranny, and oppression (in some cases, this oppression was due specifically to the British Raj, and in some cases, to the Akhand Bharat idea) into a new, just state.
In a manner that confirmed Abul Mansur Ahmed's dictum about the construction of a ‘national’ Bengali Muslim literature, nearly all the poets whose writings extolled Pakistan in the 1940s, like Farrukh Ahmed, Julfikar Haidar, Chadruddin, Roushan Ijdani, Talim Hossein, Mufakkharul Islam, and Syed Ali Ahsan, had deep exposure to punthi-path, Bengali ‘folk’ literature, and Persian, Urdu, and at times, Arabic in their childhoods. Early in his career, Ijdani was praised by Kazi Motahar Hussein for being comparable in his skills in folk literature to Jasimuddin.
These writers, therefore, already had the tools to implement the Pak-Bangla manifestoes the Renaissance Society articulated in 1944.With their attachment to Islam as a social identity, critical awareness of Bangla as a language, and engagement and exposure to Bengali folk forms, these poets produced a discursive face for Bengali Muslim politics that would mark the 1940–1947 period as an era of hopeful utopist visions for a new form of governance. Ideologically, the presence of organized communist or radical and/or revolutionary ideals appears as a vague emotive force, not an ideologically coherent portion of Pak-Bangla. But the general attraction towards ideologies of social justice was never far from the Pakistan demand, however ideologically diverse the demand's references were. Consistent with demands for Pakistan in other regions of colonial India, the notion of justice (adl) was a centerpiece of the various Pakistan ideas symbolized during the 1940s. Not only that justice was the central issue for Pakistanists, but also that the contestation of the meanings of justice, emblematic of the age of decolonization, assumed primary significance in the Pakistan decade.
In these poems, one can detect a deep continuity between earlier traditions of inserting Muslim themes, self-consciously, into Bengali literature, as an act of politics. This sort of manoeuvre signals a modern form of community aided by efforts in multiple areas—politics, geography, and history—that lifts Bengali Muslim Bengali out of the hazy tracts of ‘Mussalmani Bangla’, a name given to the forms of Bengali inclusive of numerous Persian and Arabic words generated in the late eighteenth century into a modern form, authored by modern Muslim Bengalis themselves.
It is not as if the Bengali Provincial Muslim League workers and Muslim religious leaders were aloof from these literary and poetic movements. On the contrary, the main religious leaders of the era all attended renaissance society meetings, particularly the most important and famous meeting of 1944. East Pak Renaissance was a meeting point for the diverse elements of Bengali Muslim intellectual life—religious leaders, literary critics, and Muslim League workers—to construct and enact a Bengali Muslim variant of cultural nationalism.
This cultural nationalism emanating from the pens of the mid-level ashraf who were migrating from countryside to cityFootnote 56 was but one facet of the turbulent 1940s, as with the 1946 Direct Action Day and the resultant violence that struck deep wounds into an already anxious Calcutta, polarized and embittered feelings began to seep into the most open-minded denizens of Calcutta. The vast majority of Bengali Muslim Pakistanists who were agitating for inclusion of Calcutta into Pakistan before 1946, wrote extensively about anxiously waiting for the transfer of power and the transfer to Dhaka from late 1946 onwards.Footnote 57 Indeed, Azad, the journal which recorded so many chronicles of Bengali Muslim life and also served as a logistical centre for the Calcutta-based Bengali Muslim intelligentsia, was to be no more a Calcutta fixture from mid 1947. By early 1948, offices had shifted to Dacca, as had all the staff, writers and editors. Though Abul Mansur Ahmed and many of his compatriots wrote about the sentimental role of Calcutta, by 1947 nearly all the Bengali Muslim Pakistan-ists readily embraced the move to Dacca. The politics of violence associated with communitarianism which precipitated this move were, however, quite removed from the long history of Bengali Muslim language politics surveyed above.
Conclusions
What role does the Bengali literary imagining of Pakistan play in regional histories of Bengal and in modern histories of South Asian Muslims or in histories of Pakistan? This vernacularization of the Pakistan concept complicates our current understanding of Pakistan's top-down decree as an abstract ideal handed down to the distant masses of Muslims far away from centralized power. The type of collective identity espoused by Ahmed and his colleagues demonstrates an element of late colonial contingency rarely picked up by most scholars of South Asian nationalism: the creative interplay between sameness and difference. Unlike the one-sided declarations of unanimous opposition and confusion vis-à-vis the Pakistan idea as espoused by many scholars of Pakistan in the north Indian heartland or various parts of minority Muslim India, Bengali Muslims in great numbers constructed a Pakistan via intricate plays with sameness and difference.Footnote 58 Historians of South Asia have not attempted to infuse the analysis of nationalism in South Asia with an awareness of Bengali Muslim notions of culture that were gaining currency in the Pakistan decade. Bengali Muslims had been collecting folklore and scientifically parsing a sense of Bengali Muslimness since the 1910s as a way to define the contours of their modernity.Footnote 59 As a corrective to the crippling delimitations of a scholarly ‘communalism’, this modernity need not, and historically did not, exclude fellow Bengali, but non-Muslim, Hindus, as in nearly every literary site of articulation (Saogat, Bulbul, Sikha. . .even the East Pakistan renaissance society meetings), Hindus and their intellectual life-worlds were both a part and a distant spectre to the proceedings.
Perhaps in the long tradition of marginalizing Bengali Muslim modernities and subordinating them to a broader or more powerful discourse (Bengali Hindus and Urdu-speaking north Indian Muslims as two examples) the actual content of Bengali Muslim conceptions of nation, culture, and collective identity have escaped scholarly view. Urdu, as well, remained a presence in the deliberations towards constructing a cultural agenda for Bengalis. Most Bengali Muslim intellectuals, and indeed, the East Pakistan Renaissance Society embraced Urdu as an undeniable facet of canonical Muslim contributions to Muslim South Asian literature, philosophy, and culture. Many of the same individuals behind the society formed the post-1947 Tamuddun Majlis (Assembly of Culture), which promoted the ideals of modernist Muslim culture,Footnote 60 not only within a Bengali Muslim idiom, narrowly construed to exclude Hindu and Urdu-medium expression or reference points, but to point to the new world of what Pakistan ultimately meant to these individuals: a refined, revised Bengali Muslim culture aware of the exclusions of previous hegemons.
The Bengali Muslim experience, therefore, gives texture to the ‘various vocabularies of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s’.Footnote 61 It however adds to a broader, all-Indian conception of Pakistan and partition, as frequently the Punjabi experience, to the neglect of the precise cultural and intra-cultural debates occurring in Bengal, has been used to illuminate the transition from empire to nation-state for South Asian Muslims of the twentieth history. Though Khan argues for an all-encompassing approach to the new partition historiography, this paper gives an analysis that she herself acknowledges as under-examined: the Bengali Muslim intellectual and cultural, not only high-political, perspective. This type of history allows scholars to understand anti-colonial nationalism in terms that have yet to be fully appreciated. As opposed to a ‘secret history’ of nationalism,Footnote 62 a local patriotism,Footnote 63 or a resolutely regionalist nationalism,Footnote 64 Bengali Muslim intellectuals of the late colonial period reveal an intra-cultural romanticism, a nationalism built on consciousness of hegemony and yet a resolute politics of inclusion into a dynamic regional Bengali culture. This sort of nationalism was built on a modernist interpretation of Islam and an acknowledgment of Bengal's long history of trans-regional accommodationFootnote 65 as well as highly contingent strategy of playing within the rules of late colonialism.
As opposed to a period of seemingly unending violence or high-level negotiations, the time of late colonialism included the potential for creative political and philosophical freedom. This was a period in which Bengali Muslim intellectuals were carrying out a project long denied to them, but were actively involved in shaping the contours of a regional Bengali culture, not only responding to outside forces.
In a recent work on the concept of Pakistan, Faisal Devji claims that ‘Islam [in the founding of Pakistan] represented only the empty idea of a national will untrammel[l]ed by anything given outside the idea itself. . .it is a concept of nationality based in faith rather than in history or nature’.Footnote 66 Bengal's Pakistan challenges this notion on two key fronts. First, there was a heavy sense of content in the Pakistan idea for Bengalis. It was not simply an empty force of will, but rather an actual process of intellectual labour that merged with pre-existing forms of literary and political criticism. Second, without on-the-ground Bengali activism on several fronts to popularize and publicize the imaginative idea of Pakistan, no real Pakistan would have materialized. Bengali East Pakistanism was precisely an investment in history and tradition, but re-cast away from prisons of cultural hegemony. Here the calculus of Devji's Pakistan is reversed. Bengali Muslims present a particularly intractable late colonial condition: marginalized by their more powerful Bengali Hindu bhadralok counterparts, but the majority of Bengali speaking people. Bengali Muslim intellectuals were frequently ignored by their more vociferous Indian Muslim Urdu-speaking counterparts, yet formed the majority of Muslims of colonial British India. Significantly, Bengali Muslims were the most active group of Indian Muslims who connected the idea of Pakistan to the actual needs of the peasants and workers of Bengal and counted amongst their supporters non-Muslims like Adhikari the Communist, M. N. Roy, the Radical Humanist, and Gopal Halder, another Communist and radical. Bengali Muslim concepts of Pakistan meshed also with Dalit demands for recognition, as Anupama Rao has shown with Ambedkar, who posited a ‘claim to the act of self-representation through the imagination of an alternate political and ethical community’.Footnote 67
There was the distinction that Muslims of Bengal already had an internal strand of regional politics and identity that referenced both Islam and local traditions which had been alive since at least the seventeenth century. Unlike the Maratha patrias analyzed by BaylyFootnote 68 or the Kashmiri discourses of harmony examined by Zutshi,Footnote 69 Bengal poses a distinctive regional-national type. Recognition of the erasure of Bengal's vibrant Muslim past, and the inclusion of this past into Bengal's present-day politics, along with the firm fixture of the East Pakistan solutions and East Pak Bangla/Bengali Muslim culture posed as a solution to problems of colonial India, make Bengali Muslims an especially appropriate candidate for the recasting of their regional histories. The contestations that emanate from Bengali Muslim pens vitalize not only ‘Bengali Muslim history’ but the making of modern Bengali consciousness itself and, therefore, forms a constituent part of South Asia's regional historical experiences. This presents a detour from familiar nationalist histories, whether they celebrate Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or some version of nationalism that includes Bengali Muslims into a mythical all-inclusive Bengali nation. The region in South Asian history may be recast so that Islam as a signifier of meaningful difference need not interrupt the trajectory of Bengali history which, as I have shown, is better described through a narrative of progressive self-determinationFootnote 70 that recognizes both sameness and differences, as opposed to a narrative of separatism or undifferentiated unity. Articulating a case for Bengali Muslim Bengali culture was itself a political form of nationalist thought.
Bengali Muslim intellectuals were alienated from a variety of communities of which they were nominally a part, including Bengali Hindu middle classes along with Muslim aristocrats who frequently disavowed any association with the Bengali language. The romantic nature of a Bengali cultural programme inclusive of a variety of Islamic themes and sources of reference need not deter historians from its significance. The colonial context of Bengali Muslim modernity need not result in an incomprehensible particularity, nor should the presence of Islam as a significant portion of their modernity detour us from their classically romantic nationalist tropes and strategies.Footnote 71 Andrew Sartori points to the appropriation of the ‘great tradition of Hindu nationalism in Bengal’Footnote 72 whereas my approach highlights the oppositional, and embattled, nature of such an appropriation. Whether the appropriation was conscious or not is not of importance, but the fact that language and literature were keys to an indigenously crafted set of communitarian thought must be included as not only a potentially global phenomenon but a quite understudied particular case whose contours are only recently coming into view.
Bengali Muslim intellectuals outlining this romantic sort of Bengali Muslim ‘nation’, unlike Cambridge school specialists or starry-eyed subalternists would have us believe, were constructing a form and content for a nationalist sort of belonging that historians of modern South Asia are quite ill-equipped to deal with. The materials used to construct this sort of nationalism appear nowhere in the annals of established histories of nationalism, perhaps owing to the embattled nationalist borders of knowledge construction.Footnote 73
The intellectual labour poured into the construction of East Pakistan renaissance and its literary and intellectual inheritances do not comprise a pre-history of Bangladesh. Instead, they suggest an alternative historical vision of South Asian late colonial nationalism through the Bengali case, a history that is only slowly beginning to emerge after the cathexis of Indian nationalist energies that has directed much of the recent South Asian historiography has shown to be unsustainable. When understood as a product of Bengal's own multi-religious cultural history and the romantic and creative production of culture, the Bengali Muslim League Muslim (as described by Dipesh Chakrabarty, mentioned at the beginning of this paper), that object of revulsion by many a Bengali Hindu bhadralok, ceases to be of any particular interest. Instead of being a symbol of the deceptive appropriation of popular energies,Footnote 74 he or she may become an emblem, however embattled, of Bengal's own diverse entanglements with and productions of modern romantic nationalism.
