The Defining Moments in Bengal 1920-1947

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This Work Explores Some of The Constitutive elements in the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. The author addresses some frequently unasked questions about the history of modern Bengal. In what way was twentieth-century Bengal different from "Renaissance' Bengal of the late-nineteenth century? How was a regional identity consciousness redefined? Did the lineaments of politics in Bengal differ from the pattern in the rest of India? What social experiences drove the Muslim community's identity perception? How did Bengal cope with such crises as the impact of World War II, the famine of 1943, and the communal clashes that climaxed with the Calcutta riots of 1946? The author has chosen a significant period in the history of the region and draws on a wealth of sources-archival and published documents, mainstream dailies, a host of rare Bengali magazines, memoirs, and the literature of the time-to tell his story.

Looking closely at the momentous changes taking place in the region's economy, politics. and socio-cultural milieu in the historically transformative years 1920-47, this book highlights myriad issues that cast a shadow on the decades that followed, arguably till our times.

SABYASACHI BHATTACHARYA is Tagore National Fellow, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. He was earlier Vice Chancellor of Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, and Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies. Jawaharlal Nehru University. New Delhi. He has also held teaching and research appointments at the University of Chicago: St Antony's College. University of Oxford: and El Colegio de México.

It may be useful, by way of a prefatory statement, to tell the reader how this work is structured. This is an attempt to explore some constitutive elements of the life and mind of Bengal in the twentieth century. From that point of view Bengal, as we know it today, emerged in the years between the 1920s and Independence and Partition. It is one of the arguments in this book that in the 1920s there began a redefinition of Bengal's identity. That trend distinguishes twentieth-century Bengal from the past, the era of the 'Renaissance' and its climactic moment, the movement against the Partition of Bengal. The rise of a new Muslim middle class with the spread of education was also distinctly a new feature of the early decades of the twentieth century. In the 1920s, the vernacularisation of the language of politics, increasing focus on Bengali language and culture in the academic world, a regional patriotism nurtured by public spokesmen like Chitta Ranjan Das or Prafulla Chandra Ray or A. K. Fazlul Huq, and persistent negotiations between regional loyalties and Indian nationalism of a wider ambit and significance-these were some of the signs of a new 'Bengali Patriotism' of the bhadralok elite. At the same time, there emerged a new bhadra mahila, with the commencement of a critique of conventional notions like chastity, as well as the entry of women into politics and the public sphere. The history of women's entry into political activities from the Non-Cooperation Movement onwards has often been criticized in recent days on the ground that male hegemony in the public sphere remained intact. While that generalization is by and large sustainable, in this work it has been argued that entry into the public sphere had many liberating potentials for women even though those might have been unintended consequences. On the whole, when we look at these trends the impression one gathers is that we are looking at a Bengal distinctly different from nineteenth-century Renaissance' Bengal. That is what the first two chapters are about.

In the third chapter, we turn to what some contemporary observers called 'the Hindu social order' and the place it assigned to those who were not Hindu bhadralok. Those beyond the pale in that scheme of things were substantial in number, in fact the majority of the population of Bengal. In respect of these communities the old social order was not uniformly exclusive-they were placed at different points along a continuum of exclusionary practices. Similarly, the development of community identity did not occur uniformly among these communities. Among the backward and untouchable castes this consciousness began to develop in the early decades of the twentieth century but in only a few instances did it head towards a confrontational position. Muslim identity consciousness developed at a much faster rate and it is one of the arguments in this work that it will be incorrect to simplify and reduce that complex history into the catchphrase, 'spread of communalism. While on the one hand there were tendencies towards syncretism across the Hindu-Muslim community boundaries, in both communities there were contradictory impulses towards contestation. Further, while on the one hand the so-called Hindu social order accommodated the lower castes, on the other hand there was a rigid hierarchy and abominable inequality. The general picture is one of trends towards integration, counter-acted by those that were tantamount to subordination or social exclusion in respect of the lower castes, or of the non-Hindu communities.