Empire's Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent's Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities

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Dr. Sachi (Sabyasachi) Ghosh Dastidar is a Distinguished Service Professor of the State University of New York at Old Westbury. He has taught in the U. S., Kazakhstan and India. He has also worked in Florida, Tennessee and West Bengal. Dastidar was an elected Board Member of a New York City School district making him the first Bengali-American to hold a popularly elected position in the U.S.

Sachi Dastidar has authored seven books, A Amare Dec, (1998), Regional Disparities and Regional Development Planning of West Bengal with Shefali S. Dastidar (1990), Central Asian Journal of Management, Economics and Social Research (2000) and Living Among the Believers (2006). He has written over 100 articles, short stories and travelogues. His awards include Senior Fulbright Award, Distinguished Service Professor of the State University of New York, and honors from New York City Comptroller, NYC Council Speaker, residents of Mahilara, Madaripur and Uzirpur, all of Bangladesh, Assam Buddhist Vihar, and from Kazakhstan Institute. He has travelled to over 63 countries in all seven continents including Antarctica. Probini Foundation (www.probini.org) that his wife and he founded helps educated the orphaned and the poor in 18 institutions in Bangladesh, West Bengal and Assam.

After numerous visits across the partitioned Bengal border, and hearing contradictory versions of events from the suffering minority Hindu refugees and their privileged-class refugee ruling elites in West Bengal, India, the majority Muslim ruling elites and the minority Hindu survivors in Bangladesh, gradually the idea of a documentation project evolved. But that was just an idea In the meantime, travels to West and East Europe, the former Soviet Union, North and South America, and their people's effort to learn from their past-including the horrendous abuse by the State and ruling elites - encouraged me to learn about our past, about our abuse, unpleasant as it may be, as well as the wonderful glories of Golden Bengal and Mother India In addition many Afghans and Pakistanis reminded travelers that in the absence of some documentation many of them are unaware of their roots and past history, just as in Bengal. Many in the Subcontinent still wonder why the most important mountain range in Muslim-majority Afghanistan is named Hindu Kush! Then there is the effort in some quarters to give us a new identity by changing old place names from Joydebpur (Land of (Hindu) poet Joydeb) to Gazipur (Land of [Islamic] Gazi), Dharmatala (Place of faith) to Lenin, Palong (a long of spinach-like green) to Shariatpur (Land of (Islamic leader) Shariatullah), or Chowrangee (Four-colored place) to Jawaharlal Nehru (a prime minister), Lyallpur (City built by Sir James Charles Layal) to Faisalabad (Land of (Saudi King] Faisal), Bowbazar (Bride's bazaar) to Bipin Behari Ganguly (a nationalist leader), and more In one historical city in Pakistan the residents reminded visitors that their centuries old central Laxmi (Hindu goddess of Prosperity) Bazaar business district "belonged to foreign Hindus", forgetting that those Hindus were the sons of the soil, as indigenous as one can be Realizing of such a possibility of vanishing indigenous peoples and their traditions, the noted scholar-administrator Annada Shankar Ray (now deceased) of Calcutta on July 28, 1989 presented this writer one of his Bengali articles, "Pathan, yet Hindu", (Weekly Paribartan, Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 10-26, 1989) pointing to a danger that Bengal too may be heading in that direction. To this one must add a persistent question that concerned travelers often hear in Bangladesh. Where do my people go? Answer to their question resulted in: Empire's Last Casualty: Indian Subcontinent's Vanishing Hindu and Other Minorities.

What happens to an area, to its people, to its economy, to its age-old social-cultural group relation, thus the society in general, when the area gets politically divided? This study tries to understand the dynamics unleashed by such an emotionally-divisive and politically-charged course in one of the first experiments of divide- and-rule imperial policy in colonized nations. This study is focused on Bengal, sixth largest linguistic group of the world, inhabiting one of the most densely settled areas on the planet, but linguistically- culturally homogeneous yet religiously divided To check the pan- Indian nationalism and to derail the Indian independence struggle which Bengal Province of India was playing a leading role in the late 19th and early 20th century, the colonial British administration chose to partition Bengal Province into 'Muslim' East Bengal and 'Hindu (west) Bengal provinces in 1905 in British India This experiment of divide-and-rule and the use of religion to create a political-social- cultural division where there was none preceded the well-known partition of Ireland, a few years later. Prior to this action there was no demand from either of the Muslim or Hindu communities for division British administration initiated the action and then used a section of Indian Muslims towards anti-united India, anti-Hindu and anti-kafir (non-Muslim) sentiments to check the nationalist movement then comprised of Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Jain, Parsee, Buddhist, Brahmo religious groups and dozens of intensely diverse linguistic nationalities of India One can not be sure if the British colonial administration foresaw the far-reaching consequences of their action, but Britain has been known to use divide-and-rule policy in their colonles Forces unleashed by their action could not even be controlled by Mohondas Karamchand Gandhi's pacifism and secular activism.