The Lost Dominion

SOMETIME IN THE early years of the first decade of the new millennium, a group of activists led by a smaller group of buddhijibis (intellectuals), among them late author Sunil Gangopadhyay, descended upon the famous ‘K.C. Das’ sweetshop at Chowringhee in Kolkata’s Esplanade. K.C. Das wasn’t their only target but the shop had earned their wrath by spelling its name only in English. Business names and public signage had to be all in Bangla, or at least sport a Bangla version of the name prominently. K.C. Das, a chain not confined to Kolkata or West Bengal, responded a few weeks later by displaying its name in every Indian language it could think of, English and Bangla more prominent than the rest, of course.

What do we talk about when we talk about Bengali nationalism? The sub-nationalism within India’s borders built around language that is periodically rejuvenated by fears about Hindi? Or the nationalism in East Pakistan that culminated in the language movement against Urdu and birthed Bangladesh? Is there a Hindu Bengali nationalism and a Muslim Bengali nationalism and did the twain ever meet after breaking apart? Did they have a common ancestry? Why did Bangladeshi nationalism not become extinct post-1971? How do we explain the episodic explosion of a language circus in West Bengal and Kolkata when outfits like the Bangla Pokkho (formed in 2018) proclaim from the rooftops that it’s Bangla way or the highway for one and all?

Why is it that in Kolkata I snigger at Bengali chauvinism and xenophobia but become indignant with righteous anger in Delhi when an ignoramus asks me to “get out of India” if I don’t speak Hindi?

Nationalism pertains to identity and that identity is fluid, changing in our mind as we change our location on the map, often in an inverse relationship. Because I define myself against my surroundings, I feel more Bengali in Delhi than I do in Kolkata. Indian nationalism and Indian regional nationalisms or sub-nationalisms need not be contradictory or mutually exclusive. When they are, things reach the point of violence.

If the core of nationalism is nostalgia and nostalgia is a mix of memory and desire—the glorious past is lost to us, the present is a place we don’t want to be, so we must have the future—then Bengali Hindu nationalism is informed by a sense of loss through Partition. Bengali Muslim nationalism, across the Radcliffe Line, sometimes incorporates the idea of a Greater Bangladesh. From two ends of the spectrum, memory, loss and desire mingle to create a yearning for an undivided Bengal—either what was, or what could be. This convergence was hitherto assumed to be unwitting and unconnected but the newfound verbal militancy and vandalism of recent years might suggest otherwise, albeit on the Indian side of the divide the ‘ultimate’ goal is vague, or deliberately kept vague—existing only in the imagination of a tiny minority of urbanites who apparently cannot grasp the origins and implications of their outbursts.

And yet, there is a historical reference point. A ghost that lurks in the subconscious. How many remember that between April and June 1947, it had seemed that three, not two, dominions might emerge from British India— Hindustan, Pakistan and Bengal? Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, then prime minister of Bengal, had won over Sarat Chandra Bose, Subhas Chandra’s elder brother, and with the bulk of the Bengal Muslim League behind him had convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah that Bengal should remain united, joining neither India nor Pakistan. On the Congress side, Mahatma Gandhi was open to the idea after hearing out Sarat Bose. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee went to the extent of informing the Truman administration in the US of the possibility of a three-way division of India. Louis Mountbatten, remaining unconvinced, was nevertheless brought around to giving it a shot. The opposition came from the Congress high command led by Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and JB Kripalani who added ballast to SP Mookerjee and the Hindu Mahasabha. The brief life of the proposal for a Free State of Bengal, or United Bengal, is a fascinating chapter in history which makes the meagre scholarship on it inexplicable, not least because it was an instance of Congress and the Mahasabha finding common cause.

The first partition of Bengal in 1905 was desired by Muslims and opposed by Hindus. The second partition of Bengal in 1947 was desired by Hindus and opposed by Muslims.

Why?

BENGALI MUSLIMS, HINDUS, Christians and Buddhists have a common mother tongue and are bound together by racial, social, cultural, economic and other ties, and a Free and United Bengal where they can fully cooperate with one another is essential for their social, economic and political progress,” read the Draft Basis of Agreement on a Free and United Bengal, dated May 25, 1947. This was the crux of the case: Bengal had its own identity (which region or community didn’t?), built first around its language and only thereafter around religion. As a result, a Bengali Hindu ora Bengali Muslim was first a Bengali and then a Hindu or Muslim. It would be unfair, tantamount to a cultural holocaust, to divide Bengal along communal lines and destroy the sense of unity and identity that living together for centuries had imparted to Bengalis. Suhrawardy said so to Jinnah, Sarat Bose said so to Gandhi; and the two men agreed. In his response to the original draft agreement of May 20, Gandhi had written to Bose: “There should be an admission that Bengal has a common culture and common mother tongue—Bengali. Make sure that the Central Muslim League approved of the proposal notwithstanding reports to the contrary… I propose to discuss the draft with the (Congress) Working Committee.”

Interest in the subject, in fact its factuality, was briefly rekindled when Madhuri Bose’s The Bose Brothers and Indian Independence: An Insider’s Account was published in 2016, largely on account of the subtitle, the insider’s account it is, told through Sarat Bose’s correspondence and statements, documents from his son Amiya Nath Bose’s archives and, most importantly, the recollections of Amiya Bose who died in 1996. On March 8, 1947, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) had passed its resolution recommending the partition of Punjab (this was before Mountbatten arrived on March 22) and Maulana Azad, Congress president, declared the extension of the principle of division to Bengal as well. This was the point of departure for Sarat Bose who told the press on March 15: “By accepting religion as the sole basis of the distribution of Provinces, the Congress has cut itself away from its moorings and has almost undone the work it has been doing for the last sixty years… To my mind a division of Provinces on a religious basis is no solution of the communal problem. Even if the Provinces were to be so divided, Hindus and Muslims will still have to live side by side in them and the risk of communal conflicts will remain. Supposing we divide Bengal and the Punjab on the basis of religion, what about the Muslims in western Bengal and the Hindus in eastern Bengal, or about the Muslims in eastern Punjab and the Hindus and Sikhs in western Punjab? …Any division of the country or of the provinces on religious basis will not help us in bringing about amity, not to speak of unity, which the Congress has so long stood for. An overhasty surgical cure will involve us in confusion and disaster.”

Bose’s tragic prophecy, as his son and confidant observed, would come true. But perhaps Bengal could yet be saved? According to The Bose Brothers: “On 10 May 1947, Sarat met Gandhi at Sodepur near Calcutta, at 2 pm, to have preliminary discussions with him on the proposal for a United Bengal. Later in the afternoon of the same day between 4 and 6.30 pm, Sarat was on hand at his 1 Woodburn Park residence in Calcutta, for discussions with Bengal Congress leaders Kiran Sankar Roy and Surendra Mohan Ghose. Later the same evening atWoodburn Park, from7.30 pm, ameetingwasconvened by Sarat where Bengal Muslim League leaders Suhrawardy and Abul Hashim joined the aforementioned Bengal Congress luminaries, along with Bengal Congress stalwart Satya Ranjan Bakshi. Here, the scheme for a United Bengal was the only item on the agenda and was thus discussed in some detail. Time was short, but Sarat was moving as quickly as he could.”

This was the point when the United Bengal proposal took serious shape having been first publicly mentioned by Suhrawardy at a press conference in Delhi on April 27 where he had called for “an independent, undivided and sovereign Bengal in a divided India as a separate dominion”. In The Partition of Bengal and Assam, 1932-1947 (2004), Bidyut Chakrabarty writes: “Criticising the partition demand sponsored by the Hindu Mahasabha and the Congress as ‘short-sighted’ and a ‘confession of defeatism’, Suhrawardy argued strongly for a united Bengal because Bengal was indivisible in view of its ‘economic integrity, mutual reliance and the necessity of creating a strong workable state.’ In his view, Bengal continued to remain economically backward primarily because of the presence of a large group of non-Bengali businessmen who, in the name of earning their livelihood, exploited the people for their own benefit.”

Here was the neat formula that created a useful backstory of unity and transferred culpability for Bengal’s ills to its non- European, non-Bengali business community. Suhrawardy was a master of political manoeuvring and perhaps he has been unfairly treated in Indian accounts, but could it have been any different given that the shadow of the August 1946 Great Calcutta Killings hangs over his premiership? But in April 1947, this divisive figure, who was at loggerheads even with the non-Bengali, landed-gentry faction of the Bengal Muslim League led by Khawaja Nazimuddin, and who certainly wasn’t trusted by Bengal’s Hindu population, was positioning himself as Bengal’s saviour.

Suhrawardy had not only secretary Abul Hashim but the bulk of the Bengal League with him. When he approached Jinnah, it didn’t take long to bring him around, despite the fact that a united Bengal of Hindus and Muslims would be a living contradiction of the two-nation theory.

Before Suhrawardy’s press conference in Delhi, Jinnah had already told Mountbatten on April 26, “If Bengal remains united… I should be delighted. What is the use of Bengal without Calcutta; they had much better remain united and independent; I am sure that they would be on friendly terms with us”. What was Jinnah’s motive and how did it dovetail with Suhrawardy’s? Chakrabarty writes: “Jinnah was impressed by Suhrawardy’s scheme, probably because it was a stepping stone towards attaining a greater Pakistan comprising provinces in which Muslims constituted a majority.” This was the hope which could surmount the impracticality of two wings of a divided Pakistan. But, “[w]hat probably lay at the root of Jinnah’s concern was the fact that east Bengal as a separate state was not economically viable. He agreed with Suhrawardy that east Bengal ‘although it has not a large enough population is so deficit in food grains that no amount of intensive cultivation will be able to produce a sufficiency’.” According to the Transfer of Power volumes the accounts are based on, the 1947 Governors’ Conference had highlighted how “economically, [east Bengal] could not survive as all the coal mines, the minerals and the factories are in western Bengal, so are the jute processing mills”. Thus, Chakrabarty argues: “Jinnah’s defence of the united Bengal proposal may have stemmed from the anticipation that it would secure Calcutta, the commercial capital of India, for the proposed dominion in which Muslims constituted a majority. Describing Calcutta ‘as the heart of Bengal’ around which ‘the province has developed and grown’, he insisted that ‘Calcutta should not be torn away from Eastern Bengal’.”

But unlike Jinnah, Suhrawardy had made another, more political, calculation. Ayesha Jalal, in The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1994), offers a broader perspective on his motives: “In Bengal, Suhrawardy had long seen the implications of partition. Unlike the Leagures in the Punjab, he was ready, indeed keen, to form a coalition ministry, since he could see that the best insurance for the dominance of some Muslims over an undivided Bengal was to bring the Congress into a junior partnership in the firm that planned to rule Bengal.” Things didn’t quite work out. “But the Congress High Command put paid to this plan by endorsing the Hindu Mahasabha’s demand for partition. This meant Suhrawardy’s only hope was to cut loose from the centre, by asking for an united and independent Bengal. Paradoxically he had a greater chance of getting Jinnah’s endorsement for this scheme than of getting it ratified by the Congress High Command. An undivided Bengal was vital for Jinnah’s strategy.”

Thus Jinnah and by extension the League squared the twonation theory with the proposal for a united Bengal. And thus Suhrawardy’s scheme and Jinnah’s game-plan fitted together. But just as Congress had already torpedoed Suhrawardy’s earlier initiative by supporting the Mahasabha on partitioning Bengal, it would do a repeat with the new plan. Therein lay Sarat Bose’s role, his disillusionment and break with Congress.

SARAT BOSE HAD arrived at the scheme for a united and sovereign Bengal with less political calculation but more idealism. He was a secular socialist and envisioned a united republic of Bengal where religion would be eclipsed by revolution aka social justice. On May 23, Bose told the press: “If the Free State of Bengal comes into being, it will be a Republic and its nature and character will be Socialist… I want to impress upon the public of Bengal and the rest of India that the cure for communalism is not communalism. We have to approach things for an altogether different and healthier outlook—and that is the socialistic outlook. The solution I have offered is the creation of Socialist Republics— call them Free States, if you will… By the word ‘Free’ I mean freedom not only from political bondage, but also freedom from social and economic servitude.” (The Bose Brothers)

The tension between idealism on Bose’s part and calculation on Suhrawardy’s was already simmering, although Bose seemed not to have noticed. Gandhi’s letter of May 24 to Bose mentioned earlier had actually begun with a warning: “There is nothing in the draft stipulating that nothing will be done by mere majority. Every act of Government must carry with it the cooperation of at least two-thirds of the Hindu members in the Executive and the Legislature.” The result was the revision of the draft of May 20 on May 25.

Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy, then prime minister of Bengal, had won over Sarat Chandra Bose, and with the bulk of the Bengal Muslim League behind him had convinced Muhammad Ali Jinnah that Bengal should remain united, joining neither India nor Pakistan

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Although Bose and Bengal Congress parliamentary party leader Kiran Shankar Roy were on the same page, their job was far more difficult than Suhrawardy’s given the Bengal Congress’ vehement opposition to the proposal led by Surendra Mohan Ghose and others. And the high command’s line was left unambiguous when Nehru said in an interview on May 28 that “we [Congress] can agree to Bengal remaining united only if it remains in the Indian Union”. The proposal was rendered stillborn because “the Congress High Command never accepted the scheme because ‘the independence of Bengal really means in present circumstances the dominance of Moslem League in Bengal. It means practically the whole of Bengal going into Pakistan area…’” (Partition of Bengal and Assam). How closely this echoed the Mahasabha can be judged from SP Mookerjee telling the press: “Suhrawardy’s undivided sovereign Bengal [is] a transparently political manoeuvre designed to extend the frontiers of Pakistan”.

On being asked by Patel to follow the Bengal Congress line, Bose had countered: “It is not a fact that Bengali Hindus unanimously demand partition… the demand for partition is more or less confined to the middle classes.” And yet, Chakrabarty writes: “On the basis of an opinion poll conducted among literate Hindus and Muslims in Calcutta and other district towns by the Amrita Bazar Patrika, it is evident that despite Sarat Bose and Suhrawardy’s sincerity regarding the goal of a united Bengal, the movement was an abortive one because more than 98 per cent favoured partition while a bare 0.6 per cent supported the scheme for an independent Bengal.”

Bose would soon withdraw from the campaign for a united Bengal, falling out with both Suhrawardy and Gandhi. The United Bengal scheme was officially dead with the announcement of the Partition plans on June 3. But because of his equations with Gandhi and his success with Jinnah, Bose still hoped that Bengal could be kept undivided. Madhuri Bose writes: “No doubt relieved by the assurances from Jinnah and also in receipt of reassurances of full support from Gandhi, Sarat left Delhi for Calcutta on a morning flight on Saturday 7 June 1947, seemingly more confident about the prospects of saving Bengal.” However, “Almost immediately after Sarat’s departure for Calcutta, the carefully, albeit hastily constructed plan for a free and united Bengal began to unravel. Sarat and Amiya were completely taken aback and thrown off balance by a report only two days later in the Hindustan Standard of 9 June 1947, of a statement from Gandhi after his prayer meeting of 8 June, which said: ‘Referring next to the move for United Sovereign Bengal, he said that some people had told him that the move was a sinister one. The Hindus were fed up and wanted to divide the Western from the Eastern Bengal. The Bengal Muslim League had also rejected the unity plan. But some people are still persisting with it and it was said to be due to the fact that he (Gandhiji) was behind the move. He wanted to make it clear that he could never support any questionable practice. He was told that money was being spent like water to buy votes in favour of United Bengal. He appreciated unity but not at the cost of honour and justice. He was taken to task for supporting Saratbabu.’” A series of telegrams between Bose and Gandhi ensued, indignant on Bose’s part, but while the matter of “money… being spent like water” was never proven, Bose’s disappointment was complete and his departure from Congress imminent.

With Suhrawardy, things fell apart owing to the contradictions within the United Bengal proposal. “[D]issension developed between Suhrawardy and Bose as the former publicly expressed the misgivings that the term ‘socialist pattern of society’ had aroused in him. ‘This demand’, he strongly argued, ‘cannot be made if it is decided to keep Bengal as one and allow Bengal to frame its constitution’. He was therefore unhappy with the revocation of separate electorates… As a matter of principle, Suhrawardy was not willing to concede a joint electorate [Clause 2 of the draft agreement], which meant repudiation of Jinnah’s two-nation theory. The introduction of a joint electorate would… eclipse the Muslim preponderance in the legislature in the long run. Since the Muslims in general were not enthusiastic about participating in elections, Hindus, by their zeal to cast votes in favour of Hindu candidates, would gain remarkably by the joint electorate system, Suhrawardy apprehended.” (Partition of Bengal and Assam)

Bose’s departure closed the chapter on United Bengal but mention must be made also of how divisions within the Muslim League checkmated Suhrawardy. The Hashim- Suhrawardy faction had warned Bengali Muslims: “[I]n an Akhand Pakistan they would be under the domination of west Pakistanis and Urdu would be the state language. They could not expect a better position than becoming peons under the Urdu-speaking judges and magistrates”. The real opposition to the United Bengal proposal from within the Bengal League had come from the Akram Khan faction (the Khawaja group had been won over) but they made a U-turn as soon as Jinnah made his stand known. But support for the plan waned as Partition became inevitable and it was clear that Congress and the Mahasabha, with Mookerjee’s interventions in his memorandum and letter to the Viceroy, had won the day, justifying their fear for the fate of Bengal’s Hindus. In fact, on the subject of Congress and the Mahasabha, it is debatable who helped whom more.

In the end, theUnited Bengal proposal was never put to vote.

Notwithstanding Bose’s idealism, Calcutta and the mines and industries of Burdwan were the heart of the matter. Jalal underscores another contradiction between Pakistan and United Bengal: “[T]here were strong arguments against letting Bengal go its own way. For one thing the north-western provinces were unlikely to be able to afford the large defence expenditure necessary both for the maintenance of British strategic interests and for the effective exercise of law and order inside the new state without a large subsidy from Bengal’s revenues. Already Bengal was being cast in its usual role of milch cow for the centre, in this case a ‘Pakistan’ centre which the British, however reluctantly, were now coming to consider unavoidable.” But Bengal was little without the port of Calcutta and the industry of western Bengal.

As the proposal began collapsing, Suhrawardy made one last attempt to keep Calcutta within eastern Bengal and Pakistan. Although, unlike Jinnah, he emphasised less the economic importance of the city than his own claim—that Calcutta lay within the Muslim zone, being on the eastern bank of the Hooghly and surrounded by Muslim-majority districts. This was worked into British fears of the looming communal conflagration when Suhrawardy told Mountbatten on May 31 that communal violence during the partitioning of India could be prevented by declaring Calcutta a free city. “But when Mountbatten sent Patel a proposal to give Calcutta such a status for six months, the Congress’s man of iron retorted: ‘Not even for six hours.’” (The Sole Spokesman)

SARAT BOSE WAS vindicated by the bloodbath of Partition but there is nothing to indicate communal violence would have died out if Bengal had remained undivided. On the other hand, the fate of minorities in East Pakistan and then Bangladesh vindicates the Mahasabha and the Congress high command. The partition that had to be avoided was India’s. But once the ball had been set rolling, a united Free State of Bengal would naturally have scared 45.2 per cent of the population about its future under 54.7 per cent (Census 1941), especially when the memory of the Great Calcutta Killings was still fresh. Muslim nationalism in Bengal never forgave the non-Bengali business class for its role via the Indian Chamber of Commerce in influencing Congress’ decision on partitioning Bengal. But the legitimacy of their interest in keeping Calcutta within India could hardly be questioned when seen from the western side of the Radcliffe Line.

The shared Bengali identity, made so much of, did exist. But this identity, blossoming through the liberal and culturally fertile epochs of the Illyas Shahi and Hussain Shahi dynasties and neo-Vaishnavism, was already coming apart at the advent of Mughal rule in Bengal which was the first full conquest of Bengal by Delhi. Tapan Raychaudhuri concluded his Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir (1953) with the lament: “Viewed as a whole, the first half-century of Mughal rule in Bengal was a period of immense importance. But it was not a glorious age, nor even a happy one… neither the well-ordered government nor the new wealth could create conditions which might lead to the happy development witnessed in the earlier half of the 16th century. The great days of mediaeval Bengal were definitely at an end.” The great days of Bengal ended then, notwithstanding the brief interlude of the Bengal Renaissance that lasted only a little more than a century.

Undivided Bengal lingered in the Hindu Bengali consciousness, especially among East Bengali refugees of the first couple of generations, as regret and longing. On the other side of the divide, Greater Bangladesh is a minority ambition increasingly confined to extremists. It’s when the line is blurred in the angry middle-class urban Indian Bengali mind that the ghost silently raises its head—and finds its way into campus rhetoric. Then it’s forgotten that the most disturbing legacy of the United Bengal proposal is a question we still ask: Did Partition save Bengali Hindus, even as it uprooted them from eastern Bengal? It makes us uncomfortable because we know the answer. An answer that gives the lie to a chimera.

About The Author

Sudeep Paul

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