Project Noon

Today, I am going to discuss some aspects of the interactions between Hindus and Muslims in the parts of eastern and northeastern India that we today call Bangladesh and West Bengal. Bangladesh is an independent nation-state, founded in 1971, and West Bengal is a province in the nation-state of India, formed in 1947 after the political independence of British India from Great Britain.

Earlier this year, I published a book with the title “The Hindu Self and its Muslim Neighbors: Contested Borderlines on Bengali Landscapes”.

Last year around this time, when the manuscript was nearing completion, I realized – somewhat to my shock – that I had unwittingly written a book with the title “The Muslim Self and its Hindu Neighbors”. In other words, instead of focusing on how the Hindu self was engaging with its Muslim neighbours, I had sketched some narratives of how the Muslim self was engaging with its Hindu neighbours.

In one respect, this is itself the central argument of my talk today – that in certain respects, the Hindu self and the Muslim self are so densely intertwined that it is possible that to write a book with either title. But, as we will also see, in certain other respects, they are not so densely intertwined.

To ask the question, “What are the types of interactions between Hindus and Muslims in Bengal?”, is also to ask these two quite complex questions, “Precisely who are Hindus?” and “Precisely who are Muslims?”. One reason why I say these are complex questions is because I can give you at least two types of answers to them – one descriptive and one prescriptive.

Suppose I go around asking 50,000 Hindus, across many villages, towns, and cities, in West Bengal and Bangladesh, why they may say they are Hindus and not Muslims. I compile their observations in a big descriptive file. Likewise, I go around asking 50,000 Muslims, across many villages, towns, and cities, in West Bengal and Bangladesh, why they may say they are Muslims and not Hindus. I compile all their observations too in another big descriptive file.  

However, I can follow a different pathway. Here I don’t even have to move out from a library. I can order 150 books on Hindus and another 150 books on Muslims. I can work out what some influential texts, traditions, and teachers say about how Hindus should understand themselves and about how Muslims should understand themselves. On the basis of these normative sources, I can now issue prescriptions in this way: “If you say you are Hindu, this is what you should believe and practice, and if you say you are Muslim, this is what you should believe and practice”.

Descriptive accounts and prescriptive accounts often compete with each other and within the same social space. Indeed, for much of my talk today, I shall focus on this ongoing competition between what some Muslims in Bengal may claim they already are and what some other Muslims in Bengal may declare they should become.

For the sake of clarity, I have deliberately set up a sharp distinction between descriptive accounts and prescriptive accounts of socioreligious identity. However, in the real world out there, descriptive accounts and prescriptive accounts often compete with each other and within the same social space. Indeed, for much of my talk today, I shall focus on this ongoing competition between what some Muslims in Bengal may claim they already are and what some other Muslims in Bengal may declare they should become.

Let’s consider these two instances.

1. Suppose all of us go to a small village in Bangladesh and ask the 45 inhabitants, “Are you Hindus here or are you Muslims?”. To the last inhabitant, they reply in one voice: “We are all Muslims”. After listening to them carefully for three hours, slowly and slowly the following picture emerges. Until around 50 years ago, the villagers consulted a Hindu astrologer on the birth of a child, their marriage customs involved certain Hindu rituals, they supplied flowers to the local Hindu temple, and they manufactured firecrackers for the Hindu festival of Diwali. In the autumn, they participated in a great harvest festival, and sometimes they watched in the nearby theatre the enactment of some Hindu religious narratives. Around this time, a Muslim preacher arrived – let’s call him a reformer – from somewhere in the Middle East. The reformer denounced these aspects of their existence as thoroughly anti-Islamic. He brought them back to the one true path of Islam, and he liberated them from their imprisonment to the false gods of their Hindu environments. He was especially dismayed to see that they spoke Bengali, that is, the language of the region which is also spoken by most Hindus and Christians. He urged them to learn Arabic, and in case that proved to be too difficult, at least to speak Urdu, on the grounds that Urdu is a more properly Muslim language than Bengali.
   
2. Next, suppose all of us go to a small village in West Bengal and ask the 120 inhabitants, “Are you Hindus here or are you Muslims?”. Everyone replies: “We are all Hindus here”. After several hours of listening to them carefully, the following picture emerges. Until around 50 years ago, the villagers were part of the ritual economy of a shrine on the top of a hillock. Among other things, they sold candles and incense sticks for all those individuals – whether Hindu or Muslim – who visited this shrine. Ten years ago, a Hindu preacher arrived – let’s call him a reformer too – from New Delhi. This reformer castigated their Muslim inclinations as thoroughly anti-Hindu. He charged that Muslims are not true inhabitants of the sacred motherland of Bengal. They have always been foreigners and they owe their sociopolitical loyalty to distant countries in the Middle East. They are either unwilling or unable to speak authentic Bengali that is the language of Hindus – their so-called Bengali is loaded with Arabic and Persian words.  

Now, in case you are wondering, let me admit that I have invented these two narratives. However, this is not to say that I have conjured them out of thin air. Indeed, I offer them to you as two sets of vignettes which highlight four interrelated debates in the social history of Islam in Bengal.

1. Should language be highlighted as a proper marker of an individual’s religious identity? Does one become more Muslim if one is able to speak Arabic or Persian, and less Muslim if one only speaks certain languages which historically originate in South Asia, such as Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati, or Punjabi? Conversely, does one become less Hindu if their Bengali is interspersed with Arabic and Persian words?
2. Is a group which is a geographical outsider condemned forever to the status of a cultural outsider? Islam is not an Indian religion, if we define the category “Indian religion” in a precisely geopolitical sense as a worldview which historically originates within the boundaries of the present-day nation-state of India. However, does this geographical premise immediately deliver the conclusion about social and cultural alienness?
3. Are there undisputed borderlines which Muslims should not cross if they do not wish to be regarded as having become too “Hindu-ised”, that is, too much inflected by their Hindu environments? If so, precisely who would police these borderlines at local and national levels? While there are indeed some pan-Islamic markers of Muslim identity – let’s call them the five pillars of Islam – and these days, there are also some pan-Indian markers of Hindu identity, who would assess whether or not these universals have been properly translated into their localized expressions?
4. How may we, if at all, distinguish between what is properly “religious” and what is, shall we say, only “cultural”? For instance, if an Indian Muslim woman is named “Durga Hasnat”, where “Durga” is the name of a Hindu goddess, we may agree, more or less readily, that this is not standard Islamic practice. But what if Durga Hasnat decides to wear a sari, put mehndi on her hands at a wedding, and sport a bindi on her forehead – should these sartorial and cosmetic styles too be denounced as not Islamic? Suppose someone argues that regarding the sari, mehndi, and bindi, it is possible to give symbolic meanings which are detachable from their religious Hindu contexts. Once we open up this line of argument, someone could argue that we may give a symbolic meaning also to the Sanskrit word “Durga”, which means “indomitable”, and detach this name from its religious Hindu connotations. So, how do we know when we have crossed the borderline between the “religious” and the “cultural” dimensions of a worldview, if at all that borderline can be identified with precision in the first place? Conversely, if a Hindu woman in north India decides to offer thanksgiving, after safe childbirth, at a shrine also visited by local Muslims, should this devotional offering be rejected as opposed to the ethos of Hindu forms of living?

Now, let us move into the social history of interactions between Hindus and Muslims in the timeframe of 1204 and 1971.

1204 because the arrival of Muslim rulers in Bengal is associated with a soldier called Muḥammad Bakhtiyār Khaljī who attacked the kingdom of Nadia. 1971 is when East Pakistan becomes an independent nation-state.

Even if you are not familiar with the history of Islam in Bengal, you may have encountered in textbooks the partition of British India in 1947. Let’s discuss a few aspects of this cataclysmic event, because they are related to the four themes I have highlighted.

Let’s ask that impossibly difficult question – “why did the partition take place?”. Here is one straightforward answer – the partition can be explained by using the variable of religion. There is something about the nature of Islam and something about the nature of Hinduism such that it is impossible for Hindus and Muslims to live together in the same polity.

Since today our central focus is not the partition, let’s stay away from directly addressing  the plausibility of this religion-based account of the partition. Let’s simply reflect on the somewhat intriguing fact that the variable of religion was not sufficiently stable to tie together the regions of West Pakistan and East Pakistan. To begin with, there were significant socioeconomic disparities across the two regions and also within the two regions.  

Equally important was the question of language – by and large, Muslims in East Pakistan spoke Bengali and were not proficient in Urdu, whereas some leaders of West Pakistan sought to introduce – that is, impose – Urdu in East Pakistan as the state language. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the notion had become established in many urban and elite Muslim circles in northern India that Urdu is more properly an Islamic language than the rustic Bengali of the Muslim peasants. Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script, and therefore in the vision of such Muslims, Urdu is closer than Bengali to the language of the Quran.

However, for Bengali-speaking Muslims in East Pakistan, Bengali was not a dispensable idiom that they could readily exchange with another language – Bengali was integral to their self-identification.

At the heart of this sociolinguistic dispute lies an infamous question: “Are Bengali Muslims primarily Bengali-speaking people who happen to be Muslim or are they primarily Muslims who happen to speak Bengali?”. This question is a microcosm of an even more vexed question: “Are Indian Muslims primarily citizens of the nation-state of India who happen to be Muslim or are they primarily Muslims who happen to be citizens of the nation-state of India?”.

Having dragged all of us into our own times – 2022, 1971, 1947 – I will use a temporal zoom-out lens and peer into the last eight centuries.

Now, in one geographical sense, Muslims were foreigners in the sense that they began to arrive after 1205 from lands as far away as present-day Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. However, it is crucial not to homogenize the “Muslims” as one consolidated group aggressively beating down another homogenized group called the “Hindus”.

In the land that later became known as “Bengal” in the English language, the precolonial era was marked by an extensive period when the Sultans of Bengal were relatively free from the ruling dynasties in faraway Delhi. This period was followed by Afghan rule, formation into a province of the Mughal empire, and the rule of independent nawabs. During the centuries of Bengal’s independence from Delhi, we have the Ilyās Shāh dynasty; the dynasty of Rājā Gaṇeṣa and his son Jālāluddin Muḥammad Shāh who was a Hindu convert to Islam; the rule of four Abyssinian slaves; and the Husain Shāh dynasty. 

As this sketch indicates, the Muslim rulers were Indo-Turkish, Arab, Ethiopian, and local Bengali individuals. The Turkish-Afghan rulers brought along with them soldiers, administrators, and mullahs who cultivated Perso-Islamic styles of living and presented themselves as the aristocratic elite in the midst of a largely non-Muslim population.  

At the same time, these rulers could not remain completely disconnected from their wider Hindu milieus. From the fourteenth century, Persian and Bengali were used by Muslim elites and Hindu officers at the royal court at Gaur, which today lies on the international borderline. Some circles of Bengali Hindu aristocracy were part of the Sultanate, and their administrative roles formed a channel of their Persianization in matters of dress and literary styles.

From within these crucibles, we witness what today we call the “indigenization” or “inculturation” of Islam – that is, the attempt to speak the multiple languages of Islam by using local idioms, subjectivities, and institutions,

From the time of Shamsuddīn Ilyās Shāh, one reads about Hindu landlords working alongside Muslim courtiers, Muslims calling themselves Bengali and studying Bengali literature, and Hindu poets receiving rewards from the Sultan. Such localized flavours begin to appear in texts such as a Bengali retelling of the narrative of Yusuf and Zulaikha by Śāha Mohāmmad Chagīr (c.1400). Here we read that Ibn Amin, the younger brother of Yusuf, was married to Bidhu Prabhu, a Bengali princess.

From within these crucibles, we witness what today we call the “indigenization” or “inculturation” of Islam – that is, the attempt to speak the multiple languages of Islam by using local idioms, subjectivities, and institutions, such as the name “Bidhu Prabhu”.

Now, indigenization through change of name may seem somewhat superficial. From a theological point of view, however, a much deeper style of indigenization involves the reworking, by some Muslim poets writing in Bengali, of the motif of the supremely beautiful Krishna and his beloved devotees, the cowherd women (gopīs).

Central to this Hindu theological vision is the idea that the human self should cultivate unswerving devotional love – what is called bhakti – towards God. Muslim poets read the love of the gopīs for Krishna as a symbolic representation of the yearning of the human soul for the divine beloved.

They present themselves as one of the gopīs who are riven with the pain of separation from Krishna. In these compositions, it is not immediately clear whether we should characterize the composer as a “Hindu” or as a “Muslim” – so we return to the contestation over descriptive and prescriptive accounts that I highlighted earlier.

In such songs, it is only in the “signature line” that the author is revealed as an individual from Muslim milieus who is lamenting their sorrow in separation from their friend who is the divine beloved. These sensibilities are sometimes characterized as “Sufi”. Setting aside complex debates over defining the term “Sufi”, let’s simply note that according to many historians, a vital impulse in the indigenization of Islam was given by the subjectivities of Sufi visions, such as the practices of constantly keeping God in mind, repeating the holy names of God, cultivating a fine-tuned awareness of the presence of God, and so on.

During the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, the terrains of Bengal become the sites of various shrines (dargāh) built by Sufi masters (pīrs) and their disciples. These Sufi pīrs were often believed to possess supernatural powers to perform miracles, and their dargāhs became the sites of pilgrimage and the epicentres for the establishment and the spread of Islam.

The Mughals established their capital in Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh, sometime around 1610, and gave out tax-free land grants to pioneers who would domesticate uninhabited forest tracts. A significant number of these individuals on the agrarian frontiers were Muslims, and they established mosques or shrines which became the spiritual pivots of an emerging Muslim population. Therefore, the peasants in eastern Bengal did not perceive Islam to be an entirely alien religious universe nor was Islam abruptly imposed on them by the Turkish-Afghan ruling classes.

From the seventeenth century onwards, we begin to see some concrete textual signs of such indigenization of the Meccan message. Until the time of figures such as Saiyad Sultān (c.1615–1646), Islamic texts had not been translated into Bengali, so that the general people who did not read Arabic or Persian had no direct access to their contents. To mediate Islamic idioms to the inhabitants of such Bengali sociolinguistic worlds, Sultān composed the Nabīvaṃśa in Bengali, and it is a narrative of pre-Muhammad prophets. The Quran was translated into Bengali only in the late nineteenth century and for several centuries the Nabīvaṃśa was the primary source of doctrine for Bengali Muslims.

Now we move to 1757: this is the momentous year when Robert Clive, working with the English East India Company, wins a decisive victory over nawab Sirāj-ud-Daulah. After the grant, by the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II to Clive in 1765, of the diwani rights to collect revenue, and the East India Company’s assumption of administrative control in 1772, Muslim rule was supplanted by the rule of the English.

1857 is another momentous year when a rebellion of some Indian soldiers, Hindu as well as Muslim, almost dislodges the Company from South Asia. In 1858, large parts of South Asia are placed directly under the British Crown.

So, how does Company rule and Crown rule shape or modulate the patterns of relations between Hindus and Muslims that we have been exploring so far?

Two crucial factors are often highlighted regarding the relative deprivation of Muslims vis-à-vis some of their Hindu neighbours and competitors for socioeconomic resources.

Firstly, a decisive moment was the Permanent Settlement introduced by the Company in 1793. Land revenues were fixed and there gradually emerged a class of powerful landlords (zamindars). According to some accounts, the Settlement had a particularly adverse impact on Bengali Muslims, because many of the landlords and revenue collectors were Hindus while the tenant farmers were mostly Muslim.

Secondly, the abolition of Persian as the official language of the courts in 1837, and the initial reluctance across some Muslim milieus to receive education in English, would contribute to the socioeconomic backwardness of Muslims relative to some neighbouring Hindus. It has been argued that it was easier for Hindus to move from the study of Persian to the study of English since the Persian language did not hold for them any religious connotations. 

However, just as we should not speak of precolonial Bengal as composed of one homogenous group called the “Hindus” and another homogenous group called the “Muslims”, in this timeframe too, such homogenizations would not be accurate reflections of social realities.

Even as Bengal’s Muslims are grappling with the new institutions that are being introduced through British colonial policies, their social spaces are riven with some sharp distinctions between the Urdu-speaking ashraf Muslims who belong to the urban elites and the Bengali-speaking atrap Muslims who constitute the rural peasantry. The ashraf, descended from non-Bengali soldiers, administrators, and ulema, often looked down on the forms of folk piety of the Bengali-speaking Muslims.

In other words, one crucial marker of these social distinctions was Urdu, which was mostly spoken by Muslim elites who had settled in Bengal during the Mughal period. Some Muslims declared the premodern nasīhat-nāmas (compilations of the basic teachings of Islam) which were couched in Bengali idioms as “aberrations” from Islamic worldviews. They instead began to produce texts in a style of Bengali called “Musalmāni Bengali”, that is, Bengali for Muslims, whose contours were sketched more clearly with Arabic and Persian idioms.

Now we are somewhere in the middle of the nineteenth century, and we encounter Hindu and Muslim individuals who are called “reformers”.

A steady stream of Muslim reformist preaching cautions Muslim audiences that they have become too “Hinduized” through their proximity to symbolisms, beliefs, and customs shaped by Hindu vocabularies. Leaders of various Islamic movements seek to remove the regional Hindu layers from Muslim beliefs and practices, and call on Muslims to affirm the unity of God (tawḥīd) and reject idolatry (shirk). In particular, they oppose practices such as circumambulating the tombs of pīrs, lighting lamps, making offerings to saints in the hope of receiving worldly benefits, and so on.  

These emerging oppositional styles were reinforced by two movements which were directed by Haji Shariatullah and Syed Mir Nasir Ali (Titu Mir).

While both leaders sought to remove the “aberrations” that Islamic lifestyles had picked up, the movements inspired by them were also directed against the exploitation of the peasants by landlords and indigo planters.

Therefore, these movements should not be viewed exclusively through the lenses of “Hindu” versus “Muslim” socioreligious identities. The followers of Shariatullah were opposed to all zamindars, whether they were Hindu or Muslim, and they were usually not supported by the urban elite Muslims who were seeking forms of collaboration with the British.

Now, with a deep breath, I am going to step gingerly into the extremely turbulent waters of time that run from 1900 to 1971.

Let me highlight three main sociocultural and socioeconomic processes.

1. Increasing otherization of Bengali Muslims as aliens, from the perspectives of some Bengali Hindus who are also often heavily Anglicized.
2. Increasing indigenization cultivated by some Bengali Muslims who speak Bengali and regard Urdu as a marker of elite status.
3. Increasing contestation over the hyphenated identity of Bengali Muslims, that is, the identity of the form Bengali-as-Muslim.

Towards the last decade of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a Muslim middle class begins to emerge in cosmopolitan locations such as Calcutta – these are individuals who had moved away from their rural backgrounds and received western education in the cities, and begun to compete with Hindus for professional opportunities in the British colonial apparatus. Through various newspapers, books, and pamphlets, such individuals begin to actively debate the central theme of being Bengali and being Muslim, and they also promote western education, a better understanding of Islam, and certain reforms in social spaces.

This rise of a Muslim middle class takes place against the backdrop of increasing hostility towards Muslims in some Hindu social circles. Such asymmetries were reinforced through symbolic categories such as the term jaban (“foreigner”) which was perceived as derogatory from various Muslim standpoints. It is in these milieus that we encounter one of the most volatile flashpoints of Hindu–Muslim antagonism – the ritual slaughter of the cow. This conjuncture became especially volatile when the festival of Eid coincided with religious festivals of Hindus, by whom the cow was often regarded as a sacred animal.

Concurrently with these processes of otherization are conscious efforts at highlighting everyday forms of exchanges across the milieus of Hindus and Muslims.

However, concurrently with these processes of otherization are conscious efforts at highlighting everyday forms of exchanges across the milieus of Hindus and Muslims. Articles in newspapers such as Hindu–Musalmān Sammilanī (1887), Hāfez (1892), and Kohinūr (1898) promote Hindu–Muslim unity. The Laharī (1899), edited by Muhammad Mozammel Huq, published poems also by Hindu writers. In the first volume, a poem by Jiban Chandra Bhakta criticized Hindu perceptions of Muslims as outsiders whose contact they should avoid – rather, they should know that Hindus and Muslims are children of the one God. 

Again, we find a Bengali Muslim novelist called Mir Mosharraf Hossain writing in 1888 that in Bengal, Hindus and Muslims are deeply interrelated in matters that pertain to everyday life. He issues a ringing declaration: “Regarding Hindus and Muslims, neither group can abandon the other. As long as the world lasts, this relationship too will last”. However, even as Hossain was making such proclamations, articles in newspapers published by Muslims were issuing stern reminders about the real-world disparities across Hindu and Muslim universes in terms of higher education and employment in government services.

Some of these oppositional stances were further sharpened during the agitations over the first partition of Bengal in 1905, into a Muslim-majority eastern province and a Hindu-majority western province. During these agitations for self-rule (Swadesh), the political slogans were often configured with distinctively Hindu idioms, thus further alienating various Muslim groups.

Through the first four decades from 1900, the highly explosive question of what type of Bengali Muslims should speak continues to be actively debated – in other words, the hyphenated identity of Bengali-speaking Muslims remains a site of vigorous contestation.

During these turbulent decades, we notice the embattled situation of some members of the Muslim intelligentsia. On the one hand, they defended the notion of a unified nation of Bengalis, Hindus as well as Muslims, and rejected the forms of separatism being developed by some urban Muslim elites and rural Muslims. On the other hand, they were distressed by the cultural majoritarianism of the Bengali Hindu upper classes.

Highlighting this conjuncture, in an article published in 1928 in the Muslim journal Hānāfī, the author says: “Bengali Muslims should join the Hindus on equal terms in the struggle for the freedom of the country. We believe that it is an important duty of every Moslem to strive for the freedom of their own country. But if after joining the struggle for freedom the Mussalmans have to give up their individuality and allow themselves to be merged in the Hindus, then we say a hundred times that such national movement will bring them freedom with nothing but slavery”. 

So far we have largely been looking at what may be called elite politics – what about forms of subaltern politics, that is, the everyday strategies of cultivators and peasants to gain power? The devastating famine of 1943 and wartime inflation generated radical changes in the social structures of the Bengali countryside, leading Muslim cultivators to set up committees to oppose Hindu moneylenders and landlords. In 1935 and 1936, these committees were consolidated into the Krishak Praja Party (KPP). Although the party was mostly composed of Muslims, some Hindus too supported its aims of mobilizing a peasant consciousness against social oppression. Their demands included the abolition of the zamindari system without compensation, free education for peasants, protection of the rights and the interests of Indian Muslims, and so on. The rural countryside became an active battleground between the All-India Muslim League (AIML) and the KPP in the elections in 1936-37. The KPP defended the socioeconomic interests of the largely Muslim cultivators against their Hindu landlords, and also opposed the AIML on the grounds that it was an elite body of Urdu-speaking Muslims.

In other words, we have one party, namely, the KPP with a strong Muslim base opposing the AIML, which is presenting itself as the true representative of Muslim interests. The AIML was led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, today known as the Father of the Nation in Pakistan. In 1940, the AIML declared at Lahore that Muslims were a nation. Crucially, however, till early 1946, the concrete sociopolitical ramifications of “Pakistan” were not spelled out by the AIML while it had to negotiate various regional imaginations of the new nation. For instance, in the late 1940s, many Muslim peasants envisioned “Pakistan” as a homeland free from all forms of socioeconomic oppression inflicted by landlords and urban elites. For some other individuals, “Pakistan” stood for a revolutionary space where minorities would be able to pursue their projects of self-determination.

If the question of Pakistan was not quite settled in 1947, it would continue to be actively contested in West Pakistan and East Pakistan from 1947 to 1971. After 1947, ethnic divisions between Bengali-speaking Muslims and Urdu-speaking Muslims became more sharply pronounced. The formation of East Pakistan as Bangladesh in 1971 was structured partly by the ethno-linguistic claim that the Bengali language would be a distinctive marker of the self-understanding of the nation’s citizens. These tensions are reflected in three competing visions of national belonging in contemporary Bangladesh – ethno-linguistic as speakers of the Bengali language, religious as Muslims, and pan-Islamist.

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