Cracking Bengal

The curious case of the choice not contemplated

Aug 23, 2022

Seventy five years ago last week, the subcontinent was partitioned into two countries. It wasn’t just the country and provinces that were divided -- to use Annada Shankar Ray’s words, partition entailed allotting everything from tea gardens, coal mines, colleges, police stations, office rooms to chairs, tables, wall clocks to peons, policemen, and professors into the two countries.

And yet, the great division was also followed by a great unification in the sense that the parts of the subcontinent that were governed by Indian princes, and not directly by the British, joined the independent states of India and Pakistan.

According to the research of Lakshmi Iyer*, decades after the end of Raj, Indian districts that were once under British rule still had significantly fewer schools, health centres, and roads. Further, these same districts had greater agricultural productivity. Iyer’s interpretation of the data is that the British annexed the areas with the greatest agricultural potentials, but then did not invest as much as the “native states” did in infrastructure, health, and education.

Iyer’s findings are corroborated by the work of Latika Chaudhary. She shows that in 1950, the average Indian had fewer years of schooling compared with their peers in China, Africa, and Latin America. This was partly because the Raj spent a paltry sum on education. But Chaudhary also argues that the Indian elites were complicit as they often blocked schemes to expand mass education. Further, the role of the indigenous elites in discouraging education had a distinctly communal angle.**

With Jared Rubin, Chaudhary shows that literacy rates among Muslims were negatively correlated with the proportions of Muslims in a district. However, they also show that this negative correlation disappears when one controls for the period when Muslim rule in the district had ended.

According to their interpretation of the data, if a district were still ruled by a Muslim dynasty in the 19th century, the religious establishment would have yielded significant influence over the community in that state well into the 20th century. It is this influence that would have discouraged the Muslims from taking up Anglicized education.

Of course, eastern Bengal had among the largest Muslim majorities in British India. It was also one of the earliest regions to witness the end of Muslim rule. And yet, Bengali Muslims had far lower literacy rates than their Hindu neighbours well into the 20th century. The difference in educational attainment, and thus the ability to tap into the modern economy and ultimately political power, set the stage for a Hindu-Muslim clash in the first half of the 20th century.

The popular discourse around partition is typically about finding whose fault it was. Bengalis lived in harmony, there was no Hindu-Muslim difference, it was the evil imperialist British -- that’s the secular nationalist refrain. And then there are communal accounts of the perfidious Hindu and the nefarious Muslim, neither of whom could be trusted.

There is, however, a far more sophisticated and nuanced literature that explains why people -- by which I mean the affluent, propertied classes who made the political choices -- chose particular paths instead of alternatives.

The pathos, pains, and pangs of partition in what would become Purba Pakistan is well documented in the memoirs of Jatin Sarker, Abul Mansur Ahmed, and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, among others. This history is well researched by scholars such as JH Bloomfield, Joya Chatterji, Neilesh Bose, Niaz Zaman, and Tazeen Murshid, among many others.

And this literature shows that, to the extent that there were communal differences in terms how people identified themselves -- that is, Ghoti-Bangaal differences were overshadowed by Hindu-Muslim differences -- perhaps at the micro level, for the Hindu Bengalis it made perfect sense to seek partition.

Developments in the 19th century meant that by the first third of the 20th century, they had greater shares of white collar employment, higher education, or business opportunities than warranted by demographics. And any majoritarian political configuration would have meant losing that edge.

Perhaps this was the rational choice for the affluent, propertied Bengali Hindus of upper and middle castes of the 1930s.

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What about the choice before their Muslim neighbours?

Obviously the choice made in the 1940s -- Pakistan — didn’t turn out all that well. The reasons are well understood and I don’t want to spend any time on them. Indeed, some would argue that Bengali Muslims ended up with Pakistan because their first choice -- a united, independent Bengal -- was shunned by the Hindu leadership.

One might wonder whether the case for a united, independent Bengal was ever really articulated by anyone. HS Suhrawardy’s push for it in the summer of 1947, with the support of Sarat Bose and AK Fazlul Huq, came far too late. After the bloodbath of Calcutta and Noakhali riots in 1946, one must be sceptical about the viability of that plan.

But from CR Das to the Bose brothers to Huq to Abul Hashim to Suhrawardy to the Dhaka Nawabs, none of Bengal’s political luminaries ever articulated the case for a united, independent Bengal to the Hindu bhadralok that was already apprehensive of the Muslim majority. If the said majority assumed that the pan-Bengali nationalism was self-evident and did not need articulation, then I guess they didn’t know their neighbours all that well.

What were the other alternatives before the Bengali Muslims?

One path was discarded quite early -- Ataur Rahman Khan, Abul Hashim, and Abul Mansur Ahmed all tell us that no one believed East Bengal could survive on its own. There was no taker for Bangladesh among the Bengali Muslims in the mid-1940s.

But at least that was a conscious decision. Bengali Muslim leaders thought about going at it alone, and decided that it was going to be too hard. They tried to patch things up with Hindu co-linguists, and when that didn’t work out, ended up with co-religionists from across the subcontinent.

Isn’t it curious that they didn’t try the other option? Isn’t it interesting that no one had ever made the case for a Bengali Muslim state within the Indian union?

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Think about it. A Muslim-majority East Bengal would have had its own political centre in Dacca (Dhaka). There would have been a state administration, with its own development priorities, educational, and entrepreneurial opportunities. And at the same time, the greater Indian market would have been open to the Bengali Muslims.

Abbasuddin welcomed partition because Radio Pakistan in Dacca gave him an opportunity that was denied to him in the Hindu-dominated All India Radio in Calcutta. And his children welcomed Bangladesh because Bangladesh Television and Betar had given them even greater opportunities.

But what if there was an All India Radio, Dacca? Abbasuddin could have been a local star, free of Hindu domination. And perhaps he could have made it in Bombay too, right up there with Mohammed Rafi and SD Burman.

Perhaps. But not only did Abbasuddin never seek that path, I am not aware of anyone seriously contemplating that option in the crucial years leading up to partition. Isn’t that curious?

First published in the Dhaka Tribune as part of a series marking the 75th anniversary of the end of the Raj. Photo credit: DT.

Previous articles in the series:

Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani

Another Tryst with Destiny

When the world was ours

Plain tales of the Raj

Papers

Lakshmi Iyer; Direct versus Indirect Colonial Rule in India: Long-Term Consequences. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2010; 92 (4): 693–713.

This paper compares economic outcomes across areas in India that were under direct British colonial rule with areas that were under indirect colonial rule. Controlling for selective annexation using a specific policy rule, I find that areas that experienced direct rule have significantly lower levels of access to schools, health centers, and roads in the postcolonial period. I find evidence that the quality of governance in the colonial period has a significant and persistent effect on postcolonial outcomes.

Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin; Reading, writing, and religion: Institutions and human capital formation. Journal of Comparative Economics, Volume 39, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 17-33, ISSN 0147-5967,

In this paper, we empirically test the role that religious and political institutions play in the accumulation of human capital. Using a new data set on literacy in colonial India, we find that Muslim literacy is negatively correlated with the proportion of Muslims in the district, although we find no similar result for Hindu literacy. We employ a theoretical model which suggests that districts which experienced a more recent collapse of Muslim political authority had more powerful and better funded religious authorities, who established religious schools which were less effective at promoting literacy on the margin than state schools. We test this hypothesis econometrically, finding that the period of Muslim political collapse has a statistically significant effect on Muslim literacy while controlling for it eliminates the significance of the proportion of Muslims on Muslim literacy. This suggests that the “long hand of history” has played some role in subsequent differences in human capital formation through the persistence of institutions discouraging literacy.

Other reading (and links)