Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940– 1947

Author(s): NEILESH BOSE

Source: Modern Asian Studies , JANUARY 2014, Vol. 48, No. 1 (JANUARY 2014), pp. 1-36
Published by: Cambridge University Press

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Modern Asian Studies 48, 1 (2014) pp. 1-36. © Cambridge University Press 2013
doi:10.1017/S0026749X12000315 First published online i4March 2013

Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions

of Pakistan, 1940-194J
NEILESH BOSE

Department of History, University of North Texas, i J55 Un

#310650, Denton, Texas 76203, USA
Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This paper details the history of the concept of Pakistan as debated by Bengali
intellectuals and literary critics from 1940-1947. Historians of late colonial
South Asia and analysts of Pakistan have focused on the Punjab along with
colonial Indian 'Muslim minority' provinces and their spokesmen like Muhammed
Ali Jinnah, to the exclusion of the cultural and intellectual aspects of Bengali
conceptions of the Pakistan idea. When Bengal has come into focus, the spotlight
has centred on politicians like Fazlul Huq or Hassan Shahid Suhrawardy. This
paper aims to provide a corrective to this lacuna by analyzing Bengali Muslim
conceptualizations of the idea of Pakistan. Bengali Muslim thinkers, such as
Abul Mansur Ahmed, Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, and Farrukh Ahmed, blended
concepts of Pakistan inside locally grounded histories of the Bengali language
and literature and worked within disciplines of geography and political economy.
Many Bengali Muslim writers from 1940 to 1947 creatively integrated concepts
of Pakistan in poetry, updating an older Bengali literary tradition begun in earlier
generations. Through a discussion of the social history of its emergence along
with the role of geography, political thought, and poetry, this paper discusses the
significance of'Pak-Bangla' cultural nationalism within late colonial South Asian
history.

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.1

' Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 135-136.

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 2 NEILESH BOSE

The Muslim League was

safeguarding of the rig
and political opinion. I
Islam and build up your t
service to humanity and
the way of God.2

As Dipesh Ghakrab
in modern Bengal m
historiography, part
many Hindu refugees
Bengalis who may h
populist leader Abul
Pakistan idea—appear b
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.3 Historians of Bengal, with a few exceptions,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

2 Abul Hashim, In Retrospection (Dhaka: Bangladesh Cooperative Book Society,

19,74). P-5_i■
' Historians of the Punjab such as David Gilmartin and Ian Talbot have both
recognized the need for focused study on Bengal's Pakistan movement. See David
Gilmartin, 'Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative'
Journal of Asian Studies 57, 4 (1998): 1088. Along with Ian Talbot and Gurharpal
Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 16,
Nair's Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2011), p. 9, mentions the 'many alternative meanings embodied in
Pakistan,' from a Punjabi perspective. Though her work does not focus on these many
meanings, Nair for Punjab recognizes what I execute for Bengal: a study of the many
meanings of Pakistan in the regional Bengali linguistic and cultural context.
4 Joya Chatterji does enter into this discussion by arguing that Bengali Hindu
bhadralok figures, rather than the stereotyped cliches of 'Muslim separatists' were
actually quite supportive of partitioning Bengal in the realm of regional power politics.
She also briefly touches on the rise of a Bengali Muslim middle class, migrating from
the mufassil locales of eastern and northern Bengal into Calcutta from the early
twentieth century onwards. See Chatterji, J., Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and
Partition, 1932-1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The missing
link in the historiography is a comprehensive analysis of the Bengali Muslim middle
classes as well as an assessment of Muslim Bengali visions of community during the
pivotal decade of the transfer of power.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 3

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.3
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

J The major works of social history that seriously investigate Bengali Muslims
include Sufia Ahmed, Muslim Community in Bengal. 1884-1912 (Dhaka: Oxford
University Press, 1974), Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslims, 1871-1906, AQuestfor
Identity, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), Mohammed Shah,
In Search of an Identity: Bengali Muslims, 1880-1940 (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi and Co.,
1996), Dhurjati Prasad De, Bengali Muslims in Search of an Identity (Dhaka: University
Press Limited, 1998), Shila Sen, Muslim Politics in Bengal, 1937-47 (Delhi: Impex
India, 1976), and Tazeen Murshid, The Sacred and the Secular: Bengali Muslim Discourses,
1877-1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Though Murshid and Sen do
investigate the decade of the 1940s, neither comprehensively inquires into the ways
that Bengali Muslim intellectuals and writers participated in a creative construction
of culture through the idea of Pakistan.

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4 NEILESH BOSE

begun in earlier generations, as opposed to simply co

outside forces.6
Bengali Muslim intellectuals grappling with the
Pakistan—in the Bengali language and using trad
idioms—is a set of intellectual labours that holds
in any existing nationalist historiography (Indian
Bangladeshi). In addition to clarifying the contours o
this paper also places Bengali Muslim late coloni
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.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.8 Inclusive of literary critical debates, thoughts on

6 As M. T. Ansari and Jose Abraham compellingly argue, modern Indian Muslims,

barring a few canonical 'great men', are almost never situated within modern political
thought. See M. T. Ansari, 'Refiguring the Fanatic: Malabar, 1836-1922' in Shail
Mayaram, M. S., Pandian, S. and Ajay Skaria (eds), Subaltern Studies No. 12, Muslims,
Dalits, and the Fabrications of History (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005) and Jose
Abraham, A Discussion on the Possibility of a Subaltern Reading of Indian Muslim
History,' Unpublished conference paper, 2006.
7 Parallels in other parts of the world at contiguous historical moments are easy
to find. The African American nationalist-modernist Harlem Renaissance movement
also utilized a sense of social alienation, a theory of origins, and a vexed relationship
with community (with both the broader American environment and the trans
regional, trans-national community of people descended from Africa both impinging
upon Harlem Renaissance writers' imaginations).
8 The historical literature on the general topic alludes to the formation of an East
Pakistani culture but does not investigate this in any depth. For a general overview of
the issues in literary criticism, see Asoke Kumar Chakrabarty, Bengali Muslim Literati
and the Development of Muslim, Community in Bengal (Simla: Institute for Advanced Study,

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 5

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.9

2002). Saidur Rahman's I'urba Bangla Samskriti Andolon (The Cultural Movement
in East Bengal) (Dhaka: Dana Prakashani, 1983) details this process but for the
1947-197 i period. Nitai Das' Pakistan Andolon 0 Bangla Kabita (Bengali Poetry and
the Pakistan Movement) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1993) offers a survey of major
writers but stops short in providing an analytical understanding of the movement's
relationship to broader questions of nationalism. Mahmud Shah Qureshi's Etude sur
L'evolution Intellectuelle Chez Les Musalmans Du Bengale, 185 J- 194J (A Study of the
Intellectual Evolution of the Muslims of Bengal, 1857-1947) (The Hague and Paris:
Mouton, 1971) mentions the Pakistan ideal but fails to contextualize it within the
broader world of both Bengali cultural history and the history of nationalisms.
9 Though part of the novelty of late colonial modernism is the convergence of
elements that were unprecedented, it would be mistaken to assume that this sort
of alternative world provided by literature is wholly without precedent in Muslim
Bengal. A long tradition of recounting stories familiar to Muslim readers, such as
Yusuf-Zulekha, Hatem Tai, and Satya Pir, in Bengali, predates the creative usage of
varieties of sources to craft an alternative to the worlds in which Bengali Muslims
found themselves. See Anindita Ghosh, Power in Print: Popular Publishing the Politics of
Language in a Colonial Society, ijj8—1905, (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006) for
a consideration of these sources. Ghosh states that these folk stories provided ' happy
tales of the marvellous and the supernatural which offered meaning and stability,
community, and fraternity' (293-94) to Muslim communities of the nineteenth
century who were often cut out of the benefits of formal vernacular education.

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6 NEILESH BOSE

The Production of Pak-Bangla

Calcutta's Muslim literary community of the late 1

1940s was literally and figuratively centred in the office
and literary journals such as Azad, Mohammadi, and Sao
in 1936 by Muhammed Akram Khan and his son
Khan, occupied a well known office in Entally Ro
Akram Khan and his family also were behind Moham
daily and monthly editions. In the early 1940s, Akr
seriously ill and the management and editorship of
was handed to young rising stars of Bengali Muslim jou
Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, Mujibur Rahman Khan, an
Ahmed. These individuals also went on to promote
literature, enunciate Purba (east) Pakistani autonomy
a literary-cultural movement of renaissance in the
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

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 7

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.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.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 foun
ders, the society emerged as a natural culmination of years of

10 For an introduction into the issues facing nineteenth century Bengali Muslims,
see Rafiuddin Ahmed, The Bengal Muslim, 1871-1906, A Questfor Identity, 2nd edition
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Sufia Ahmed, Muslim Community in
Bengal, 1884-1912 (Dhaka: Oxford University Press, 1974). Sumit Sarkar's essay
'Two Tracts for Muslim Peasants, Bengal 1909-1910' in his Beyond Nationalist Frames:
Postmodernism, Hindu fundamentalism, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press, 2002), along with P. K. Datta's Carving Blocs: Communal Ideology in Early Twentieth
Centuiy Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), both provide useful analyses
of early twentieth century Bengali Muslim politics on the ground that meshes an
appreciation of the local circumstances of Bengali Muslim writers, activists along
with their inheritances from earlier historical periods.
11 Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, 'Sahitya Samiti O Nazrul Islam'/Literature
Conference and Nazrul Islam, Mohammadi 14th Year, 7th Edition, Baisakh, B.S.
1348/1941.

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8 NEILESH BOSE

literary-cultural development in Bengali Muslim lett

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'.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, manyjatis, as India is a
large federation of jatis'. 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

12 Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, Atit Diner Smriti (Memories of Old Days) (Dhaka:
Bangla Academy, 1994), pp. 359-360.
13 Ibid., p. 362.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 9

our own literature'.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 Societ
concerned cultural, literary, economic, and educational freedom, th
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 variou
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 o
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 ty
of misunderstanding of the Pakistan demand. Shamsuddin referr

14 Ibid., p. 364.

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io NEILESH BOSE

him to the actual text of the Lahore Resolution'3

mistakenly promoted the false idea that India was
when in reality, it was a collection of various groups
Abul Mansur Ahmed responded affirmatively, ag
widely held perception of Jinnah as a modern
Muslim communitarian, but a fighter for minority
more food for thought, Shamsuddin lent his frien
Khan's recently published book Pakistan, replete
anthropological, and geographical ruminations ab
was the answer to the problems of 1940s India.
Pakistan was published in 1942 by the Moha
Lower Circular Road, the site of so many adda
meetings, the Azad newspaper and, from mid-1942
Pakistan Renaissance Society. It therefore emerged d
environment of Bengali Muslim literary and intell
which stretched back several decades. This book was
attempt in Bengali to intellectually outline th
Bengal. With Shamsuddin's foreword emphasizing
solution to the problems of colonial India not just fo
but for all of India, the book appeared firmly in the
1940 Lahore Resolution.
Two factors squarely planted Mujibur Rahman
of Pakistan into a revolutionary and inspirational
Pakistan's entire existence as a new nation would base itself on
language and literature. He cited a galaxy of models, like the wr
of France and Russia, whose literature provided the basis for t
respective nationalist sources of selfhood. In India, Bengali Hin
have a long list of comparable authors, like Bankim and Rabindrana
and Indian Muslims have Iqbal. Though Iqbal did not origin
mention Bengal in his early ruminations about Indian Muslim cultur
Mujibur Rahman Khan merely continued a Bengali tradition
appreciating Iqbal's philosophical and inspirational power for In
Muslims.16 As Iqbal was a pioneer in Indian Muslim letters and
of the architects of the idea of Pakistan, the book argued that

15 For the actual content of the pivotal 1940 Lahore Resolution, see Ikram
Malik (ed.), Muslim League Session, ig 40, and the Lahore Resolution (Islamabad: Na
Institute of Historical and Cultural Research, 1990).
16 Iqbal was generally praised by Bengali Muslim critics, particularly in publica
like Bulbul, Sikha, and Azad.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD

the political manoeuvres of Pakistanism in his name

Bengali Muslims to find their own Pakistan in their own
In addition to language, the book argued that mi
centralized colonial set-up, whether from the Britis
the Hindu-led Akhand Bharat-styled Congress (as the
merely following the British imperial method of govern
assumption of an indivisible India, in Mujibur Rahman
would always be disempowered in relation to the majo
inspiration coming from the distinctive Bengali Musl
the idea of Pakistan aimed to universalize the minorit
would provide the means for all groups, including possib
into a Dravidistan or Sikhs into a Sikhistan, to fully
self-determined existence. Though the practical dime
possible self-determination were not outlined, the idea
inspiration for all minority groups in India. Like the Pak
of other parts of India, the precise details of this ent
were not given but rather made a rhetorical effect o
facing Indian Muslim activists of the era.
After reading this book, Abul Mansur Ahmed came
East Pakistani Renaissance Society meetings in Cal
become an ardent admirer of the goal of protecting m
future post-colonial India, outlined in the book. In the
edition, Abul Mansur Ahmed contributed a foreword
conversion into a Pakistanibadi. Initially, he felt sce
movement that invoked religion so vaguely might be
takeover by mullahs and religious leaders, but how n
promote Pakistan as a universalist and revolutionary a
majoritarian governance.
Abul Mansur Ahmed then attended every Renais
meeting in Calcutta in 1943 and 1944. In 1943, both th
Dacca societies held large-scale meetings promoting th
proceedings of both these meetings were published
Mohammadi and received widespread circulation in th
publications of the time as well. To establish the revoluti
of the Pakistan idea, he stated that Pakistan was n
religion, but yet was inspired by Islam. Bengali Pakis
specific to the local environment, as it was allied to a
cultivation, language, and civilization. His conception
based itself on a concept of culture as a totality of life,
simply being inside that totality. Ahmed's Pakistan was a
agenda aiming at absolute social and political chan

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12 NEILESH BOSE

groups would be respected in this new political fo

for Ahmed was a revolutionary concept. By stab
of nationalism's assumption that it represented
Ahmed saw revolution in how Pakistan was based not on the idea
of a nation that represented all groups, but on the preservation o
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 provide
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

194.2 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 lgios, 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.17

17 Indeed stars of this endeavour, like the poetjasimuddin, the linguist Mohammed
Shahidullah, and thepunthi collector Abdul Karim Sahityabisharad, were all intimately
involved in this event, working as they were under the counsel of Dinesh Chandra
Sen, the great scholar of Bengali folklore. This important factor is missed in much
of the literature on Dinesh Chandra Sen, including the recent Sourav Kargupta's
'Dineshchandra Sen's The Folk Literature of Bengal: The Canonisation of the Folk
and the Conception of the Feminine' in Hans Harder (ed.), Literature and Nationalist
Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern Indian Languages (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2010).

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 13

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 Ghattopadhyaya, Bankim
Mukherji, and Gopal Haider. 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'an 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').18
But culture, or as he began to call it, tamaddun (ironically, an Urdu
word)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

18 Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, 'Abhartana Samiti Sabhapatir Abhibashan,'

(Welcoming Committee's Address) in Sardar Fazlul Karim, Pakistan Andolon 0Muslim
Sahitya (The Pakistan Movement and Muslim Literature) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy,
1968), p. 100.
19 The irony here is a reflection of a later period, as in 1944 Abul Mansur Ahmed
and the great majority of Bengali Muslim cultural activists saw no reason to oppose
or critique the usage of Urdu.

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14 NEILESH BOSE

cultures must develop to their full

to the anthropological or theoretic
by these writers did include a spac
futurism. Though a focus on distin
past was emphasized, the very n
literature and critical space was i
The way forward would not be an
himself, hailed as a great world
not reach such heights by imita
Milton. Citing the Irish case, no
in London, but had to find a dis
to truly capture the Irish experi
advocated the awareness of punt
Bangla writing as a part of the Ben
people to start writing punthis alo
Bengali Muslim literature like Da
as an inspiration for a model of lit
any outside influence, like Benga
he advocated the conscious usage o
khana, pani, allah, khoda, roza, nam
seen as foreign non-Bengali words
at universities'.20 This issue had
now, it took shape in the form of
Mansur Ahmed had experienced
Hindus who hegemonically contr
The broader sentiment of a cultu
but distinguished itself from H
co-religionists had been various
but without any unified politica
of the concept of Pakistan, su
plausible ideological sense. It, how
conjunction of a variety of com
into a larger programme, of the
regional 'tree' of Bengal, and a
against centralizing, and imperia

20 Abul Mansur Ahmed, 'Mul Sabhap

(ed.), Pakistan Andolon 0 Muslim Sahitya,
21 As a recent scholar has written, Abu
highly dependent on the contingent c
centralizing tendencies of the Indian N

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD !5

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.22

his critique. See Andrew Sartori, 'Abul Mansur Ahmad and the Cultural Politics
of Bengali Pakistanism' in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew
Sartori (eds), .From the Colonial to the Post-Colonial: India and Pakistan in Transition (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005). This should not, however, detract from the
overarching importance of the Pakistan ideal in Bengali literature and thought.
22 There were a variety of proposed territorial schemes offered by different
branches of the League. Raghib Ahsan, in his Confederacy of East Pakistan and
Adibasistan, created a confederation between Eastern Pakistan, composed of Bengal
and Assam, and also an Adibasistan for tribals of eastern India. This included all
of Bengal and Assam, whereas another view, supported by Nazimuddin and Akram

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i6 NEILESH BOSE

Regardless of the discussions about territory th

in the mid-1940s, it was clear that Purba Pakistan
were advocating the existence of two separate states,
state. However, the ideological contours of const
Muslim politico-economic platform formed an od
the literary-cultural basis behind Purba Pakistan
this booklet's claims about culture and history, polit
conflicted with the claims of cultural nationalism, as
behind Bengali Muslim politico-economic indepen
different from the assumptions behind the instan
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'.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,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

Khan, in The Construction of the State of Eastern Pakistan, advocates a Pakistan completely
shorn of any the Western Hindu majority portions.
23 Mujibur Rahman Khan,Eastern Pakistan, p. 17.
24 See Ayeshajalal, Partisans ofAllah:Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 2008), Chapters 1 and 2.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD
17

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.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'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.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.

25 Eastern Pakistan, p. 18.

26 Ibid., p. 24.
27 Abul Mansur Ahmed, though not formally a Communist, was also sympathetic
to the Soviet position.

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i8 NEILESH BOSE

In Bahar's 1942 essay, he appends Khan's maps

Pakistan. Framed by the claim that Pakistan wa
out in political science attentive to various fa
misinterpreted by nationalists promoting an Ak
Bahar's entire thesis is grounded self-determinat
by Soviet commentators like Stalin and by hist
Lenin and Wilson, both of whom were staunch rhet
self-determination. Wilson, unlike Lenin, categorica
the emancipation of the colonies but Bahar cited
Like Mujibur Rahman Khan, Bahar claimed t
organic 'nation' in India. According to Bahar
as a unitary nation was an illusion fronted by
propagandists. Rather, echoing the All India
official position, India was rather a collection o
communities. With this in mind, he stated how
using outdated, parliamentary centralized models
will go only in a modern European direction. So h
principles: 1) Akhand Bharat was a myth; 2) B
parliamentary government did not suit India; 3) eve
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.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.29 There must be, on the

28 See Habibullah Bahar, Pakistan (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1968), a collected

edition of essays on the topic.
29 This of course meshed with Jinnah's thoughts on the unitary centre created
by the British in India. See the discussion of this point in Ayesha Jalal, The Sole

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD *9

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.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'.31

Spokesman:Jinnah, the Muslim League, and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985). Also, M. N. Roy wrote in this period that the commonwealth
was a legitimate and functional form of federation, a form that fitted the Indian
political scenario. See Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Delhi:
Routledge India, 2010). So whilst outlining a distinctively 'Bengali Muslim' cultural
nationalism, Bahar and the East Pakistan Renaissance Society also simultaneously
were direct interlocutors into broader debates on decolonization and impending new
nation-states in colonial India.
1,1 It is debatable whether or not pre-existing forms of political governance which
existed in India could have replaced the British imperialist, or European nationalist,
models at this particular point in history. Sugata Bose has intimated that such
models did exist in 'Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of 'India'
in Bengali Literature and Culture' in Sugata Bose and Ayeshajalal (eds),Nationalism,
Democracy, and Development: State and Politics in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1997) and 'Between Monolith and Fragment: A Note on the Historiography of
Nationalism in Bengal' in Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (ed.), Bengal: Rethinking History,
Essays in Historiography (Delhi: International Centre for Bengal Studies). Bose'
examples include the political thought of Gandhi, Tagore, B. C. Pal, and Chittaranjan
Das. In any case, the proponents of Purba Pakistan did not cite pre-existing models
but aimed to create a politics of the future.
31 Communist, 2, 9 (1940), p. g. Another politician of the era, B. R. Ambedkar, the
outspoken advocate of the Untouchable communities, voiced a reasoned sentiment
behind the Pakistan proposals, though his main concern was that a rushed departure
of the British Empire would exacerbate, rather than solve, the minority problems of
India. Although Ambedkar could follow the emotional import of the Pakistan ideal, he
also found great logistical problems with its actual implementation. See his Pakistan
or Partition of India (Bombay: Thacker, 1945).

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20 NEILESH BOSE

But when discussing the idea of Pakistan, Adhikari

after the Pakistan idea had floated around for a few
he clarified the distinction between 'a just quest for
a separatist two-nation theory'32 as the Communist
the former. Regarding the rising power of Muslim iden
that the Communist Party did not see communalism
demand, but 'the rise of anti-imperialist nationalis
among the Muslim masses'.33 Echoing the sentiment
report said that the denial of self-determination for on
deny it for all.
East Bengal presented a unique case unlike any
of Muslim India, as the Muslim peasantry of Ben
distinct cultural and geographical characteristics. It
terms, a 'transitional form' and their unique element
socio-economic situatedness should be recognized. Su
another communist who supported the East Pakista
Society, suggested that the very existence of a Purba
united, Pakistan, meant that India consisted of many
Adhikari's Pakistan and National Unity was directly ci
for the arguments of the geographer Nafis Ahmed, in
Pakistan, which appeared in 1947. The principles of self
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'.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

32 G. Adhikari, Pakistan and National Unity (Bombay: People's Publishing House,

1943). P- *5
33 Ibid., pp. 28-29.
34 Nafis Ahmed, The Basis of Pakistan (Kolkata: Thacker, 1947), p. 161.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 21

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'.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.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.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'.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'.39 For Karim, culture was an organic expression of place
and environment, so it 'assimilates, adapts, and amalgamates all the

35 Ibid., p. 173.
36 Ibid., p. 168.
37 Rezaul Karim, Pakistan Examined with the Partition Scheme of Dr. Latif, etc. (Kolkata:
Book Company, 1941). Karim wrote books on Hazrat Mohammed, Maulana Azad,
and significantly, writings in defence of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, including
'Bankimchandrer Nikat Musalmaner Reen' (The Debt of Muslims to Bankim
Chandra) in 1938 and his 1944 book Bankimchandra 0 Muslim Samaj.
38 Rezaul Karim, Pakistan Examined, p. 9.
39 Ibid., p. 10.

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22 NEILESH BOSE

surrounding conditions of the age' and so, there

Muslims hold a common culture brought out by thei
is not, then, as the East Pakistan Renaissance Society
of hegemonic power relations.
In addition to seeing 'culture' as a natural, rather th
a politically purposeful site of social change, Kari
the influence of British imperialism in complete
Renaissance Society line. Whereas Bahar and the R
clearly saw the Congress' 'Akhand Bharat' unified sta
of imperialist thinking, Karim believed that the
may be 'a clever hint of the imperialistic power
dying embers of communalism'.40 Karim also me
imperialist to think of division, whereas Bahar an
Renaissance Society saw it the other way around.
Other intellectuals prominent in Bengali Muslim
as S. Wajed Ali, Kazi Abdul Wadud, and Humayun
supportive of conceptions of Pakistan. S. Wajed A
a 1945 essay about the dangers of the division of
lines, includes a cogent vision of community that
Pakistan idea for Bengali Muslims.41

Literary imaginings

Regardless of detractors, the Pakistan movement

in more than just theory. Many society members pr
preached in the form of Purba Pak literature. F
1947, a generation of writers, some from earlie
Mostafa, and younger poets like Farrukh Ahmed a
waxed philosophical and cultural about Pakistan. T
of the Purba Pakistan ideal into poetic practice w
occurrence, but it articulated the Pakistan demand
of political theory. This poetry of Pakistan blended
and points of view into an aesthetic that prod
the Bengali and Muslim components of identit
continuation of pre-existing forms into a new i
Pakistan. Though not exactly a cohort in the soci

40 Ibid., p. 39.
41 See S. Wajed Ali in 'Bharatbarsha,' in Syed Akram Hossein (ed.), S. Wajed Ali
Rachanabali Vol I. (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1985.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 23

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.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

42 Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) was a Bengali Muslim poet, musician, and
social critic who stood out as amongst the most innovative and progressive Bengali
Muslim writers of his generation. He began to write poetry and songs in the late
1910s, after a brief stint in the British Indian army during World War I. Many of
his poems and writings detail freedom, revolution, and conceptions of spirituality
and religion. Nazrul was the first Muslim poet writing in Bengali to coherently
and consciously use unprecedented images, references, and tropes from Islamic
civilization and the greater Islamic world (often engaging with references from the
Shi'a Muslim traditions) into modern Bengali. Before Nazrul, Muslims had long been
writing in Bengali, but he stood out as the first, and therefore pioneering, voice
of self-consciously including Muslim themes in modern Bengali literature. For an
introduction to Nazrul's life and impact, see Mustafa Nurul Islam (ed.), Nazrul Islam
Nana Prasange (Nazrul In Many Different Contexts) (Dhaka: Nazrul Institute, 1991)
and for a historical overview, see Priti Kumar Mitra, The Dissent of Kazi Nazrul Islam:
Poetry and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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24 NEILESH BOSE

working within a literary tradition but also were

institutional forces that enabled an increasing numb
and a higher numbers of readers.
Abul Mansur Ahmed's exhortations about cre
Bengali Muslim literary culture did manifest, to
the varied poetic writings supporting the idea of
initiated in the late 1910s, this was not a new pheno
ideals that already had a presence in Bengali M
equality, justice, brotherhood, deliverance from o
a new level of consciousness with the introducti
of Pakistan. It also reciprocally produced more i
language, culture, and social life within a trans-re
Golam Mostafa evoked trans-regional Islamic the
descriptions of Pakistan. Though he wrote profus
Song of Pakistan), a song which depicts Jinnah as
New Age'. Amongst his Pakistan songs, his most pop
'Pakistani Jatiya Sangit' ('Pakistan's National Son
Bhatiyali Sangit' ('Pakistan's Bhatiyali Music'),43
1945 in Mohammadi.
Both songs clearly heralded the coming of a ne
soldiers would come forth to fight for Pakistan, br
Eid' (Arabic for festival or holiday, often referring
end of Ramadan) and when the azan (Muslim call t
called by a new Bilal (muezzin, or one who calls t
to prayer).44 In 'Pakistaner Bhatiyali Sangit', M
pre-existing Bengali poetic imagery—that of bo
salvation—to the Pakistan context, as he exhorted
him on a boat to the new kingdom of Pakistan' f
everything, including the water, the air, and the
sweeter.

Another man of the Nazrul generation, Shahadat Hossei

'Awban' ('Call') also in 1945. Also printed in the Mohammadi, t
concerns salvation and freedom, without clear references
but with constant references to victory and pride, embodi
new flag of Pakistan. In addition to not referencing Benga
Islam and Muslims were also not explicitly mentioned. Thi

43 Bhatiyali is a particularly Bengali musical form found in East Benga

44 'Pakistani Jatiya Sangit' in Sardar Fazlul Karim (ed.), Pakistan Andolo
Sahitya, p. 161.
45 Ibid., pp. 162-163.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 25

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 inMohammadi 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').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.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

46 'Gan' in Sardar Fazlul Karim (ed.), Pakistan Andolon 0 Muslim Sahitya, p. 185.
47 'Tarani-i-Pakistan' in ibid., p. 171.

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26 NEILESH BOSE

of tauhid' (monotheism or unity of God), Muslim India

break out of their hopeless situation. Finally, Muslims h
who they really are, qua Muslims. As such, he includ
beginning with the proclamation of'I am Muslim' in v
in terms of political power, in terms of peace, in t
practices, and beliefs. But the poem ends with the a
to God that he is a Muslim born and raised in India
meaning of Islam is to eradicate injustice, to develop
cleanse all impurities from humanity.18
Whereas Mufakharul Islam and Talim Hossein's po
either abstract or directly referencing Muslims and Isl
like Roushan Ijdani, interpreted jalim and majlum a
Indians, Hindu or Muslim. In his 'Jagibe Abar Maha
India will Rise Again') published in 1947, he lists bo
Muslim reference points like Yudhisthir, Janaki-Ram,
Ali, Haidari, and a galaxy of historical Hindus and M
a call to Shiraj-ud-daula, as those who will rise to an
freedom for Indians enduring the common source of
British Raj. Pakistan, in Ijdani's poem 'Raigir', writ
published later in 1949, the new state would be a lan
maitri-samyer hukumat', or the authority of equality,
harmony, would rule.49
These were ideas put into all-India and trans-re
terms. But Bengal as a region was also referenced in
First, long-standing Bengali poetic themes common
and pre-Nazrul poetry, including the images of boatme
appear in the Pakistan poems. In particular, Farrukh
through Nazrul's aesthetic mingling of the Bengal
a trans-regional Islamic sensibility, by imagining ho
be a saviour delivering freedom to the land of aush dh
paddy fields, in Bengal.
Published in 1944 in Mohammadi as well as in his book
Majhi (The Boatmen of the Seven Seas), the poem
example of how both Nazrul's inheritance and the emot
East Pakistan idea manifested in Bengali Muslim liter
narrates a downtrodden time for India, when faith
itself were on the wane. Through the rise of the Proph
and exemplary heroes, like Umar and Ali, the wor

48 'Ruje Pakistan,' in ibid., pp. 177-180.

19 'Raigir' in Roushan Ijdani, Raigir (Dacca, 1949), pp. 31_32

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 27

triumph of peace, but the poet continually asks for a

deliverance from this plundered world, and from a w
and oppression. Continually throughout the poem, Fa
asks if the great flag of Islam, of liberalism, of peace, an
flow again in this 'aush dhaner desh' or the land of padd
to Bengal. Just like Nazrul in his path-breaking poetr
1920s, Farrukh Ahmed ends his 'Nishan' with a mer
and cultural references, as he hopes that the 'wonde
Mecca' will shine on this 'aush dhaner desh'. As opposed t
directly about Pakistan, this poem rather signals the sea
legitimacy in a Bengali framework. Farrukh Ahmed's
a representation of this moment of confluence in Bengal
use of images of boatmen, the Bengali landscape, and
the environment for Pakistan contributed both to Be
and the expanded the idea of Pakistan.
The direct influence of Nazrul also appeared in the w
Julkifar Haidar.50 His life course also followed a simi
From a family of Persian scholars and writers, Haidar
in Persian, Arabic, and, also,punthis from a young age. H
in World War I in Iraq and returned at the close of th
During the inter-war period, he followed literary develo
but in 1942, retired from his office job and began to wr
time, mostly about the Pakistan movement.
His first book of poetry, Bhanga Talwar (Broken Sw
in 1945. Though many poems in the book contained
politics or Islam, the political poems in the book fit with
tenor of trans-regional Islamic sentiment and anti-coloni
'Kofiyat' ('Explanation'), he asked how long the 'inhum
of India will last in the present age. In another poem
titled 'Islam', he directly equated Islam with equality
'Islam samyabadir dharma/Sakaler tare sakale amra/m
bhai bhai' ('Islam is a religion of equality/Everyone i
all brothers').51 These sentiments were stated in alm

50 Kazi Motahar Hossein, the celebrated critic and philosopher, w

was the first Bengali Muslim writer since Nazrul to combine highly
skill with condemnations of oppression and tyranny. See Nitai Das,
Bangla Kobita (The Pakistan Movement and Bengali Poetry), p. 87.
51 Though the first edition of Bhanga Talwar was published in 194
extant version of it was published in Dacca by the Islamic Academy
p. 87-88.

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28 NEILESH BOSE

fashion 20 years earlier in Nazrul's 'Samyabadi' p

Haidar also equated Pakistan as the carrier of fre
also in the same book. In this poem, he writes tha
raha dhare muktir pathe chale' ('Let us take the new
freedom in Pakistan') and that 'jeta majlum nirbh
habe dabidar' ('fearlessly, oppression will be taken
His work also put the striving for Pakistan in jiha
from a long tradition of jihadist discourse in South A
Ho Sabdhan' ('Helmsman, Be Careful!') sees Jinnah
crores of jihadist Muslims seeking freedom. Jihad
a specific political or spiritual event, but was used
struggle for freedom.33
The ideological effects of poetry written by and
demand were as varied in style and content as the w
some had vague communist backgrounds, like Far
some staunchly opposed communism, like Golam Mos
Ahsan. A few, such as Benazir Ahmed, wrote convinc
and communism actually matched. Some, such as
adhered to a total rejection of all that was not strict
whereas others, such as Aminul Islam Chaudhuri,
of an all-Bengali culture informing their sense of
emphasized the sentiment that Pakistan would e
out of a negative state of ignorance, tyranny, and o
cases, this oppression was due specifically to the
some cases, to the Akhand Bharat idea) into a new
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,

52 See Neilesh Bose, "Political Modernity and Ideological Traffic: Bengali Muslim
Modernism and the Wide World of Samyabadi (Egalitarian), 1911-1925' South Asia
Research 31,3 (November 2011) for a discussion of these poems.
53 Ibid., p. 88.
54 Though certainly different to the main actors in Ayeshajalal's Partisans of Allah:
Jihad in South Asia, the basic thrust of Haidar's critique meshes the long-standing
tradition of appropriating the concept of jihad for temporal and this-worldly purposes.
55 One verse displays the jihadist urge: 'Koti koti mora mukti pran ei bharate
jihadi Musalmarvjatir mukti tare dite pari akatare janmal korban/mora chai
Pakistan/Moder Shadher Azad Pakistan' (We are crores and crores of jihadi Indian
Muslims seeking freedom/For the freedom of our jati we would unflinchingly sacrifice
our lives/We want Pakistan/We want that Pakistan which we long for), see Nitai Das,
Pakistan Andolon 0 Bangali Kobita, p. 8g.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 29

Mufakkharul Islam, and Syed Ali Ahsan, had deep e

path, Bengali 'folk' literature, and Persian, Urdu, and
in their childhoods. Early in his career, Ijdani was
Motahar Hussein for being comparable in his skills
to Jasimuddin.
These writers, therefore, already had the tool
the Pak-Bangla manifestoes the Renaissance Societ
1944.With their attachment to Islam as a social id
awareness of Bangla as a language, and engagement
Bengali folk forms, these poets produced a discursive
Muslim politics that would mark the 1940—1947 pe
hopeful utopist visions for a new form of governa
the presence of organized communist or radical and
ideals appears as a vague emotive force, not an ideo
portion of Pak-Bangla. But the general attraction t
of social justice was never far from the Pakistan d
ideologically diverse the demand's references were.
demands for Pakistan in other regions of colonial Indi
justice (adl) was a centerpiece of the various Pakistan
during the 1940s. Not only that justice was the ce
Pakistanists, but also that the contestation of the mea
emblematic of the age of decolonization, assumed prim
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.

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3° NEILESH BOSE

This cultural nationalism emanating from the pen

level ashraf who were migrating from countryside
one facet of the turbulent 1940s, as with the 1946 D
and the resultant violence that struck deep wounds
anxious Calcutta, polarized and embittered feelings
into the most open-minded denizens of Calcutta. Th
of Bengali Muslim Pakistanists who were agitating
Calcutta into Pakistan before 1946, wrote extensively
waiting for the transfer of power and the transfer to
1946 onwards.57 Indeed, Azad, the journal which re
chronicles of Bengali Muslim life and also served as a
for the Calcutta-based Bengali Muslim intelligentsi
more a Calcutta fixture from mid 1947. By early 1
shifted to Dacca, as had all the staff, writers and e
Abul Mansur Ahmed and many of his compatriots
sentimental role of Calcutta, by 1947 nearly all the
Pakistan-ists readily embraced the move to Dacca. T
violence associated with communitarianism which p
move were, however, quite removed from the long hist
Muslim language politics surveyed above.

Conclusions

What role does the Bengali literary imagining of Pakistan p

in regional histories of Bengal and in modern histories of S
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 th
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-a-vis the Pakistan idea as
espoused by many scholars of Pakistan in the north Indian heartland

56 See Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided, chapter two, 'The emergence of the mofussil
in Bengal politics,' pp. 55-102, for a discussion of this phenomenon.
57 Abul Mansur Ahmed, Arnar Dekha Rajnitir Panchas Bachar (Twenty-Five Years of
Politics as I Have Seen It) (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2001), pp. 262-293.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 31

or various parts of minority Muslim India, Bengali Muslims in great

numbers constructed a Pakistan via intricate plays with sameness and
difference.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.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,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,

58 Indeed as A. F. Salahuddin Ahmed has remarked, if the two-nation theory was so

inaccurate and off the mark, when East Pakistani rebels constructed their own state,
why did they maintain a separate 'Bangladesh' that included only East Bengal and
not attempt to merge their own cultural and linguistic identity with the already-in
existence West Bengal?
59 I am not suggesting that Bengali Muslims are the only ones collecting folklore
about their literary past, but they appear to be the only regional group doing so as a
challenge to prevailing orthodoxies about their linguistic and literary identities.
60 Though the Tamaddun Majlis awaits a comprehensive history, oral historical
interviews with surviving members along with an examination of their manifestos
confirms this interpretation. See the interviewwith AbdurGafr, 23June 2011, Dhaka.

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32 NEILESH BOSE

revised Bengali Muslim culture aware of the exclus

hegemons.
The Bengali Muslim experience, therefore, gives texture to the
'various vocabularies of freedom in circulation in the late 1940s'.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,62 a local patriotism,63
or a resolutely regionalist nationalism,61 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
accommodation63 as well as highly contingent strategy of playing
within the rules of late colonialism.

61 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven,
Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 5.
62 Partha Chatterjee,^4 Princely Imposter? The Strange and Universal History of the Kumar
ofBhawal (Princeton, Newjersey: Princeton University Press, 2002).
63 C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government
in the Making of Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
64 Prachi Deshpande, Creative pasts: historical memory and identity in western India, 1700
ig6o (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
65 The literature on early modern Bengali culture is vast; for a position advocating
syncretism, see Asim Roy, The Islamic Syncretistic Tradition in Bengal (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). For a critique of syncretism, see Tony K.
Stewart, 'In Search of Equivalence: Conceiving Hindu-Muslim Encounter Through
Translation Theory' History of Religions 40, 3 (2001): 261—88; and for a critique of
Stewart's approach in a different context, see Torsten Tscacher, 'Islamic Literature in
Tamil and the Study of Muslim Vernaculars in South Asia,' conference paper, Margins
and Centers in South Asian Islam, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, 11
March 20 x 1. A concise overview of the debates about syncretism is found in Thomas
De Bruin, 'A Discourse of Difference: 'Syncretism' as a Category in Indian Literary
History' in Hans Harder, Literature and Nationalist Ideology: Writing Histories of Modern
Indian Languages (Delhi: Social Science Press, 2010).

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 33

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'.*'6 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
Haider, 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'.67

66 Faisal Devji, 'The Minority as Political Form' in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona

Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori (eds), From the Colonial to the Post-Colonial: India and
Pakistan in Transition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 94.
67 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2009), p. 140.

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 NEILESH BOSE
34

There was the distinction that Muslims of Beng

internal strand of regional politics and identity th
Islam and local traditions which had been alive since at least the
seventeenth century. Unlike the Maratha patrias analyzed by Bayly6
or the Kashmiri discourses of harmony examined by Zutshi,69 Bengal
poses a distinctive regional-national type. Recognition of the erasur
of Bengal's vibrant Muslim past, and the inclusion of this past int
Bengal's present-day politics, along with the firm fixture of the East
Pakistan solutions and East Pak Bangla/Bengali Muslim culture pos
as a solution to problems of colonial India, make Bengali Muslims a
especially appropriate candidate for the recasting of their region
histories. The contestations that emanate from Bengali Muslim pen
vitalize not only 'Bengali Muslim history' but the making of moder
Bengali consciousness itself and, therefore, forms a constituent pa
of South Asia's regional historical experiences. This presents a deto
from familiar nationalist histories, whether they celebrate Pakista
or Bangladesh, or some version of nationalism that includes Benga
Muslims into a mythical all-inclusive Bengali nation. The region
South Asian history may be recast so that Islam as a signifier of
meaningful difference need not interrupt the trajectory of Benga
history which, as I have shown, is better described through a narrativ
of progressive self-determination70 that recognizes both sameness and
differences, as opposed to a narrative of separatism or undifferentiate
unity. Articulating a case for Bengali Muslim Bengali culture was itsel
a political form of nationalist thought.
Bengali Muslim intellectuals were alienated from a variety
communities of which they were nominally a part, including Beng
Hindu middle classes along with Muslim aristocrats who frequentl
disavowed any association with the Bengali language. The romant
nature of a Bengali cultural programme inclusive of a variety of
Islamic themes and sources of reference need not deter historians from

68 See C. A. Bayly, The Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and the Making o
Ethical Government in Modern India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
69 Chitraleka Zutshi, Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making
Kashmir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
70 Here I follow Andrew Sartori's 'The Resonance of 'Culture': Framing
Problem in Global Concept History' Comparative Studies in Society and History 47,
(October 2005), as the Bengali Muslim materials certainly demonstrate 'the und
determination of human subjectivity' (699), though my goals here are decidedly mu
more modest. Rather than attempting to speak for anything global, I merely po
to how this highly particular culture-concept revises current understandings of So
Asian late colonial nationalisms.

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 PURBA PAKISTAN ZINDABAD 35

its significance. The colonial context of Bengali M

need not result in an incomprehensible particularit
presence of Islam as a significant portion of their m
us from their classically romantic nationalist tropes a
Andrew Sartori points to the appropriation of th
of Hindu nationalism in Bengal'72 whereas my app
the oppositional, and embattled, nature of such an
Whether the appropriation was conscious or not is not
but the fact that language and literature were keys to
crafted set of communitarian thought must be inc
a potentially global phenomenon but a quite unders
case whose contours are only recently coming into vie
Bengali Muslim intellectuals outlining this romantic
Muslim 'nation', unlike Cambridge school specialis
subalternists would have us believe, were construc
content for a nationalist sort of belonging that hist
South Asia are quite ill-equipped to deal with. The
to construct this sort of nationalism appear nowher
established histories of nationalism, perhaps owing
nationalist borders of knowledge construction.73

71 I do not have the space to elaborate on the 'classically ro

displayed by Bengali Muslim writers before and during the Pak
my thinking here is guided by the romantic emphasis on langu
literature, folklore, and the role of an individual in a specific en
all Bengali Muslim literary critics and intellectuals emphasize
The romantic nature of the nationalist thought put forth by B
and critics reflected their position vis-a-vis hegemons of two
bhadralok perceived popularly to be in control of the Bengali lan
Muslims resident in Bengal (some for many generations) who
what they perceived to be a non-Muslim language.
72 Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of Capit
73 Though Bengali Muslims lived through the cliched 'Thre
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the politics of East Pakistanis
intellectual movements from the 1910s, fit nowhere in establish
or Bangladeshi nationalist historiographies. Andrew Sartori's
and the Cultural Politics of Bengali Pakistanism' clarifies th
analysis of Abul Mansur Ahmed's logical denial of an inclus
in the cultural arsenal of East Pakistan. See also John Br
and Historians: Some Reflections. The Formations of Nationa
Discourse' in Claire Norton (ed.), Nationalism, Historiography, and t
the Past (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2007) fo
of the relationship between state-centred nationalist histories (a
limiting force in historical writing.

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36 NEILESH BOSE

The intellectual labour poured into the construction

renaissance and its literary and intellectual inher
comprise a pre-history of Bangladesh. Instead
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,74 he or she may
become an emblem, however embattled, of Bengal's own diverse
entanglements with and productions of modern romantic nationalism.

74 Pakistan as a 'peasant Utopia,' but ultimately manufactured out of the

machinations of power-seeking politicians, is a line of argument that has commanded
popular and scholarly attention in studies of the Pakistan ideal in Bengal. My brief
analysis has shown how the Pakistan ideal, interpreted broadly and by a multiplicity
of agents, actually emerged out of long-standing discussions by Bengali Muslims
themselves, in the Bengali language. This conscisousness need not teleologically read
Pakistan back into Bengal's history uncritically, but rather, revise our understanding
of the Pakistan concept itself. See Taj-ul Hashmi, Pakistan as a Peasant Utopia:
Communalization of Class Politics in East Bengal, 1920-1947 (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1992).

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